Why the Data Gene is (Still) Under-Represented in Management

Rob Collie (00:00): Hello, friends. A long time listener recently messaged me on LinkedIn and asked me a classic question. "Why do so few people in positions of business authority seem to have the data gene?" It's a question truly worthy of our contemplation because, let's be clear, it's a question born out of exasperation. This is a dynamic that probably plays out 20,000 times a day around the world. One in which someone in power makes a decision that is obviously bad for the business and bad for its employees, a true lose-lose, while one or more of our Data Gene Tribe sits there, powerless to intervene.

(00:37): For reasons that become immediately obvious, I am not going to give the name of this listener, but she's worked in the world of finance for nearly 30 years and has been that powerless Data Gene-er in that story so many times. She told me, "Having worked under many finance leaders without data genes, I've had more than my fair share of stories to tell." Did you catch that part? Many finance leaders without the data gene? Finance leaders. No data gene. How is that even possible, right?

(01:07): She also recounted a horror story in which one of the big four consulting outfits sold one of her former companies a project in which they, the client, were forced to manually move and translate mountains of data one piece at a time from one GL system to another. Now there was a digital and automated solution that would have done that job in days and she did point this out to leadership. But leadership bypassed it and opted for the manual process which stretched out well over a year. A year of dumb de-humanizing work all while the original business need languished. If this needed to be done, it probably couldn't wait a year.

(01:47): While the details differ from story to story, I bet that sounds familiar to you. You have your own versions of that tale from your own experience. Now everyone who listens to this show has the data gene, so we're amongst friends here. Our tribe. A fair number of you are business leaders and we're so grateful that you're the proverbial exception which proves the rule. You know that you're rare. Even you struggle to gain traction with your non-data gene management colleagues.

(02:16): Why isn't the Data Gene Crew better represented in positions of business leadership? The whole world has come to accept that dispassionate data-driven decision making leads to better outcomes than do gut instincts, cronyism, and tradition. Given that, we'd naively perhaps, expect the data gene crowd to be practically running things by now. But even though there's definitely been an upward trend in that regard, the situation today is probably much closer to the same as it was 10 years ago than it is to some sort of seismic inversion of that long-running status quo.

(02:49): Today I'm here with a list of four reasons why I think the data gene is underrepresented in management roles. Number one. There aren't enough of us. One-in-16. That's the approximate distribution of the data gene in the general population. I've done research on two separate occasions with two completely different methodologies and both pointed to the same rough fraction, one-in-16. Even if Data Gene-ers were equally represented in management at the same rate at which they occur in the general population, we'd still expect only about one-in-16 managers to carry the data gene in their makeup. When you think of it that way, we're probably not that far off from one-in-16. A little under that, I'd bet, just not by a lot.

(03:34): But that doesn't answer the real question. If we assume management jobs comprise, let's say 10 to 15 percent of all office jobs, and Data Gene-ers are about six or seven percent of the population, we still have a mystery on our hands. Data-driven thinking is an advantage. Why aren't we feeling something more like one-in-four management jobs? The relative scarcity of the data gene, one-in-16, does partly explain the mystery here, but it is definitely not a complete explanation. We need to keep looking.

(04:05): Which brings us to number two, reason number two. The person who asked me this question said something like, "Now I know that the sales gene and the data gene aren't found in the same person very often and people in leadership often have the sales gene." I think she's absolutely onto something here, but I want to generalize it away from the word sales. Instead, I would say that the single-most important skill for success in organizations is persuasion. Yes, sales falls under this header, it's a subset of persuasion. But if we call it persuasion instead, it helps us see it in a much broader light. You can't achieve anything in an organization if you can't get others to agree with you, or at least to support you.

(04:47): Persuasiveness is the most important trait to advancement, hands down. Persuasion is more about emotions and motivations than it is about data. Persuasion is, sadly, 100% possible without data. Persuasion is not possible without people skills, no matter how much data you bring, unless you're allied with someone else who does have the persuasion talent. But of course, if you're allied with them, they probably have at least a recessive copy of the data gene so it's almost cheating in that case.

(05:19): Now to be clear, I don't think persuasion is negatively correlated with the data gene. I think it's just that persuasion is itself a rare-ish talent. If one-in-10 people are especially persuasive, and one-in-16 have the data gene, well, even if things were just completely random, we'd expect less than 1% of individuals to possess both. You could work long stretches of your career without encountering one of these rare dual-threats, to use a sports metaphor. I don't think necessarily that having the data gene makes you less likely to be persuasive. I just think in general, it's hard to be exceptionally talented, even at one-in-10 rates, one-in-16 rates, on multiple dimensions.

(06:00): Now of course, there is a dark side to the skill of persuasion. It's like The Force in Star Wars, it can be used for good or evil. We do see plenty of examples where persuasive people repeatedly make bad decisions and get away with it, and it's frustrating. And that these people tend to also often be quite self-serving makes it even worse. I'm aware that persuasion has a dark side. But it's also possible to be persuasive, and objectively grounded, and to act with integrity. Persuasion can be used for good.

(06:33): Data can also be a very powerful tool in the art of persuasion, but you're still going to need those soft skills. No one should delude themselves into desiring a world where we sit with our data models and formulas, and everyone hangs on our every metric. If you're waiting for that, you'll still be waiting when the human race is gone. Not a good career strategy. More on this later.

(06:55): Reason number three. The business world simply got off on the wrong foot and that led to very durably persistent stereotypes. It simply wasn't even possible to be data-driven in business until very, very recently. I'd argue that it's really only become possible in the last 15 years. Centuries of non-data-driven business wore deep, deep, deep wheel ruts into the road. Persuasion, for instance, would always be the number one trait in business no matter what, but there'd have been more room for quieter, data-driven types if the tools had been adequate from the beginning. We got off on the wrong foot and the stereotypes tend to self-reinforce.

(07:34): Society learned a long time ago what kinds of people tended to succeed in business. They weren't the Data Gene-ers because, well, the tools weren't there. The persuasive non-Data Gene-ers dominated. It makes sense. Then when they go looking for the next generation of leaders, they tend to look for themselves. That also makes sense. Max Plank famously said one time that, "Science doesn't progress through a combat of ideas and the best ideas float to the top." He said, "Instead, science advances one funeral at a time." That the old guard has to leave to make room for the new and better ideas.

(08:08): I think the same thing is true in business, except that it advances one retirement at a time. If the entire world of business started fresh today with the tools we have today, I think these stereotypes wouldn't have gotten started, at least at nearly the same strength that they did. A fresh start would be different. We don't live in that world.

(08:27): Now let's move onto number four, which is really almost like 3-A. It's an extension of reason three. It's not just stereotypes. One of the dynamics that got established in the business world is that the sidelining of the data gene crowd led to its own reinforcement cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy. To explain this, imagine someone in an analyst role today, someone who has the data gene, and is pretty smart, and energetic, and disciplined. Let's say that they also have fairly strong soft skills like communication and empathy. On that critical dimension of persuasive skill, they're right in the middle of the bell curve. It's neither a strength or a weakness for them. Overall, this is a promising mind, an under-valued and under-utilized asset for a business.

(09:10): Okay. But because they're pigeonholed in the role of "the person who gives me the numbers when I need them," they don't have the opportunity to gain reps as a decision maker. They're shut out of the rooms where they would gain the experience they need. When they do speak up and they do suggest a different course of action, both the contents of their ideas and the way in which they present them suffer from that lack of experience. Their suggestions might actually not be workable, not be as smart as they think because they have never been given a chance to see the other parts of the picture.

(09:46): Now that's not their fault, of course. But if the planets align one day and there is one opportunity where the business leaders would happen to be receptive, if the Data Gene-er speaks up and makes a suggestion that comes across as ill-informed, well, that's going to have lasting consequences. It's going to reinforce the trope that the data gene crowd lacks real business sense, and that the analyst should be trusted to operate the data tools but not trusted to think. Those same leaders are going to be even less likely to listen the next time. It's a catch-22. By being locked out of the room, Data Gene-ers lack the experience and full 360-degree business visibility to make good suggestions and deliver them in a properly persuasive manner. Which by the way, leads to being locked out of the room. Self-reinforcing.

(10:36): This is pretty sad, isn't it? I was even told one time by a promising young executive who was being groomed for really big things that his mentor had recently advised him to stop building his own spreadsheets and Power BI models. Why? Why did the mentor say this? Because the people who build such things are looked down upon. "They aren't trusted to be business leader material," so this mentor said. The mentee in this story was dangerously close to being permanently branded as a member of that lesser tribe. Oh, so sad.

(11:09): I think that perception does remain pretty widespread today. While a lot of that perception is driven by ignorance and tribalism, the catch-22 of being locked out of the room is real and does provide some real fuel to that fire. Data Gene-ers often do come across as naive, but primarily because they've been deprived the chance to gain the needed experience.

(11:34): I have some more to say about that, but first let's turn the corner and say, okay, that's the analysis. Those are the four reasons. But what can be done about it? As a global question my answer is, well, basically nothing can be done about it. It will either get better or it won't. Getting better, I think, requires a wave of retirements even as a prerequisite. But on a microscale in your own career, or in your own organization, there are definitely things you can do.

(12:01): If you're one of those promising analytical minds I talked about earlier, pigeonholed in the analyst role with its self-reinforcing cycle of limited experience, well, you can switch gears from making suggestions to asking questions. Understanding the motivations and broader business contexts that decision makers operate under, well, that takes work. It does require that you have at least one decision maker who's willing to answer your questions. But this is a lot more attainable, a lot more reachable than jumping straight to getting your suggestions followed. Again, if you find someone who's willing to answer questions and fill you in more completely, you can start gaining that experience. You will start to see things differently. Over time, with the rapport gained between you and this decision maker, there's a chance they'll be more receptive to your ideas down the road. But you're going to have to bite your tongue a bit and jump to conclusions and not jump to suggestions in the early going. Else, you risk breaking that valuable relationship and losing access to its value experience-building reps.

(13:03): On the flip side, if you're a business leader decision maker type and you notice one of these promising people, you can take them under your wing just a little bit, and give them precisely that same kind of exposure. Help them start to see the broader picture that they'd otherwise be lacking. Don't expect them to immediately know how to navigate your hallways of business context, nuance, and persuasion. Don't hold them to that standard off the jump. Be patient. You came up through a very different path than they did. Guess what? You're not just being kind here. You're not just developing future talent for your organization. You are going to get better results out of them almost immediately. This pays off short term and longterm for you, as well as for them.

(13:48): Now lastly, some advice that I'd like to share with anyone, anyone at all, is to always role play the other person's job. Make it an obsession. Asking yourself, "Why might they be doing things the way they are? Why might they be opposed to certain alternative ideas?" Take the time to try to imagine the pressures and incentives in play in their role. Imagine the existence of off-camera information that they see and you don't. What might it be?

(14:17): Throughout this process, give them the benefit of the doubt. Imagine that they are 100% honest and 100% well-intentioned, and also intelligent. Because with that perspective, you're more likely to see the hidden information. Believing that other party is dumb or short-sighted is often a lazy cop-out, which blocks us from seeing the bigger picture and becoming more successful and happy. Plus, if you apply that benefit of the doubt diligently and generously, and you can't come up with any positive explanations, eventually you can confidently conclude that this person that you're talking about might lack intelligence and/or integrity, which happens. Then it's easier for you to get motivated to change jobs. Because again, the cynical mindset traps us even in bad jobs. If you're not willing to look deeper, you just assume that everyone in leadership everywhere is either dumb or dishonest, and it's your lot in life to suffer. No, that's not true at all.

(15:18): There absolutely are good leaders. At least as many good leaders as bad ones. Learning to confidently tell the difference over time is an important skill for guiding your career. Also, when you're role-playing the other person's job, you don't even have to reach confident conclusions with any of these thought exercises. In fact, you should try not to reach convictions. Possibilities are enough, nor do your multiple choice hunches have to be correct. It's not really the point. The point is to start rewiring your brain to do this as a habit. You'll get better and better at it over time, and your accuracy will come up. But along the way, it helps you ask better questions. It helps you spot and avoid pitfalls. It helps you present your thinking in a form that is more likely to be accepted. And longterm, it helps develop that experience I'm talking about. Plus, you'll become much better at, wait for it, persuasion. Which, whether we like it or not, is the most important ingredient to career success. That's something we all want, data gene or no.

(16:20): Thanks again, as always, for listening. Thank you specifically for providing this question, dear listener whose identity I'm not revealing. By the way, if you've got a question, hit me up on LinkedIn. I love this stuff. In the meantime, catch you next week.