As pre-work for my Rethinking Data workshop, I ask people to send me a question or challenge that they have when working with data.  A common question I get (in both the pre-work and the workshop) is how to deal with leaders that constantly ask for data.  Here is a recent email that I received.:

I have the following question as a pre-work for the training: What’s your suggestion to deal with the following case?

Especially when interacting with senior management I find that even though I leave out from the main material a lot of the supporting data I do get questions about the underlying data and have to go into them in-depth on the spot, where focus should be more on the decision. I feel that this is because senior managers have more/broader experience on data analysis and also on business matters. Therefore, they want to be sure that the conclusions drawn and recommendations made are really the correct ones, and they would arrive at the same outcome if starting from the available data, otherwise they are not 100% comfortable to make the decision. Worth to add that occasionally senior manager will ask different question (hypothesis) and also find supporting data, or look through a different context so in fact arrives at totally different recommendation/conclusion about what step should be taken

Here is my response:

The situation that you raised is a difficult one and one that I often hear.

There are three reasons that the executives behave in the way that you described.  Our workshop will address the first one.  Unfortunately, the second two are more of an issue for the executive than you, but they make your life more difficult.

1. Your thought/reasoning process is different from theirs – this is the most common problem I see.  It’s usually why executives (or anyone else) will ask you to see the data.  Very often we don’t know how the executive is making a decision.  In other words, we don’t know the criteria that they are using.

For example, suppose that a particular product is not selling well and you tell the executive that you think that we should increase the marketing for that product.  You give the following three reasons:

Profitability is down from last year

Market Share is down from last year

Retailers aren’t providing enough shelf space

That sounds like a pretty good argument.  However, suppose the executive believes that the right time to increase marketing is when:

Consumers aren’t aware of the product

Consumers are cost-focused

Competitors are aggressively driving promotions

In this case, even if you have good data to support your conclusion, the executive isn’t going to agree with you.  More importantly, he or she is going to ask you to walk through the data in order to map it to his or her criteria.

The key to solving this problem is to better understand the decision-maker’s criteria BEFORE you collect and analyze data.  Doing so will ensure that you look at the right data.  More importantly, it will help you present the information that the decision maker is seeking, in the way that he or she is seeking it.  It’s not always easy to do so.  However, if you can, you will find that you get fewer requests to walk through all of the data (you’ll still probably be asked some follow ups).  This is one of the key principles of the workshop and we’ll spend a lot of time working on this in the workshop.

2. They don’t trust you – I’m not talking about integrity.  I mean they don’t trust your skill to analyze the data.  If the executive needs to walk through the data to ensure that he or she would come up with the same answer, he or she shouldn’t have you analyzing it. It’s inefficient to “run” the analysis twice.  A good executive will audit your thought process, not your data. Unfortunately, this is more their issue than yours (they are probably insecure or a micromanager).  However, the bad news is that even though it’s their problem, you have to deal with it. Your best bet is to get better at aligning your criteria with theirs.  Doing so may increase their trust since they know you are giving them what they need.

3. It’s an old habit – Believe it or not, many leaders ask to see the data simply because they always have.  I once told an executive that employee engagement was decreasing.  She said, “Show me the data”.  So, I showed her a line graph with employee engagement going down.  She said “OK”.  Then, I asked her three questions:

Did she think that I was incapable of interpreting a graph with a line going down?

Did she think that I would lie about the trend?

Did she not already suspect or know that employee engagement was going down?

She answered “No” to all three.  I then asked her, “If you knew I could read a graph, didn’t think I’d lie about it, and already suspected that what I said was true, why did you need to see the graph?”  She couldn’t answer.  She said she just “felt better” seeing it.  That’s just a bad habit.

Many people look at or ask for too much data simply because that’s what they’ve always done.  Again, this is not something we directly fix in the workshop (because that’s their problem more than yours).  However, I have found that when you get really good at simply answering their real question and do so using their criteria, they will tend to ask for less data.

One thing that we will talk about in the workshop is that your brain is actually sort of lazy.  It doesn’t like to work very hard.  Therefore, if you make it easy for some to understand you and make a decision, they tend to do so. The problem is that when we present data using a different set of criteria or over complicate what we present, people get confused.  They then ask to see more in order to try to organize things on their own.

If people are constantly asking you to walk them through the data, you are probably encountering one of more of these three issues.  Effective data-driven decision making is driven as much by good communication as it is by good analysis.  Make sure that you understand how your decision maker is making the decision.  Align your criteria with his or hers. And provide the answer as simply and clearly as possible.

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Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and author with Avail Advisors. Avail’s Rethinking Data workshop will help you and your team become more efficient and effective at making data-driven decisions. For more information contact brad.kolar@availadvisors.com.