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Howdy data folks, it’s great to have you hear. Today’s edition of Strategies For Effective Data Leadership is all about reframing the relationship that data teams have with business stakeholders.

Many of the data leaders I speak to, and the teams I come across find themselves in this awkward ‘customer service’ dynamic within the organisation. There are usually strong historical and structural reasons for this being the case, but I truly believe that with the right approach, a determined data leader can turn this around. They can take their team from service desk to business partner in a relatively short amount of time. I talk about the various ways to do this quite often on my LinkedIn, but to kick the journey off, we need to start with the language we use when speaking to them.

In this edition, I’m diving into a question you should never ask your stakeholders, why it is so bad, and why it keeps you at their beck and call.

Then, I’ll introduce you to a much better question you can ask so you can start levelling the playing field and get you shifting from dashboards monkey to strategic contributor in no time.

Let’s do this.

The questions you should avoid is: “how can I help you?”

It really sounds harmless, doesn’t it? It sounds like the kind of question we should be asking stakeholders if our goal is to be helpful members of the team, right?

Every stakeholder relationship has a starting point, and the words you open with set the terms for everything that follows. They tell the other person why you are here, how they should treat you, and what they can reasonably expect from you.

When you open with "how can I help you", you open the door for your stakeholder to walk right in and make themselves at home. You’ve straight away cast yourself as the provider, and them as the customer. From that moment on, the relationship runs on their terms. They decide what the work is, they decide what good looks like, and they decide when you have delivered.

You’ve made it clear: YOU WORK FOR THEM.

This is why the question matters so much more than it appears to. How stakeholders perceive you determines how much influence you get to have. A data leader seen as a helpful pair of hands will be handed task after task. A data leader seen as a thinking partner is treated differently. She gets brought into decisions. The gap between those two positions is enormous, and it often comes down to how you show up in the first thirty seconds of a conversation.

Unfortunately, the damage from this framing builds slowly, so most data leaders never trace it back to the question itself. Here is what tends to happen.

1️⃣ You get handed solutions instead of problems. When you invite people to tell you how to help, they respond with the solution they have already settled on in their head. "I need a dashboard that shows X." You end up building exactly what was asked for, whether or not it solves anything.

2️⃣ You lose the diagnostic conversation. The most valuable part of data work happens before any building begins, in understanding what someone is actually trying to achieve. Leading with "how can I help" skips that conversation entirely and drops you straight into execution.

3️⃣ You get treated as an executor rather than an advisor. Once you have positioned yourself as the person who fulfils requests, stakeholders will stop coming to you for your thinking. They come to you when they already know what they want, which is almost always too late for you to add any real value.

4️⃣ You invite a queue rather than a relationship. "How can I help" is an open door for more requests. It signals that you are always available for tasks and that this is the right way to work with you. Stakeholders will keep walking through that door without ever seeing you as a partner.

The good news is that this is one of the cheapest problems in data leadership to solve. You do not need a reorganisation, a new tool, or executive buy-in. You need to change the question(s) you ask.

The better question is simple: "what problems are you experiencing?"

This question does two things straight away. It gets the stakeholder thinking in terms of problems rather than solutions, and it repositions you as someone who cares about their situation rather than someone waiting for orders. You are the data expert here. Working out the right solution is your job, not theirs, and this question keeps that responsibility where it belongs.

It’s an open ended question that invites an exploratory conversation, rather then a closed questions that requires a very specific answer, as is the case with “How can I help you?”

Here is how to put it into practice.

Start every new stakeholder conversation with the problem rather than the offer. Instead of "how can I help", try "what problems are you dealing with at the moment?" or "what is getting in your way?" You are inviting them to describe a situation, which gives you something to think about rather than something to build.

When someone hands you a prescriptive solution, gently walk it back. If a stakeholder opens with "I need a report that shows Y", resist the urge to nod and start building. Ask what decision the report will inform, or what prompted the request in the first place. I have written about this pattern of prescriptive solutions before, and it is worth a read if this is a constant battle for you.

Keep returning to the problem as the conversation develops. Every time the discussion drifts back towards a specific output, bring it back to what they are trying to achieve. This keeps you in the diagnostic seat and stops the interaction collapsing into order-taking.

Do this consistently and something shifts over time. Stakeholders start coming to you earlier, with problems rather than instructions. They begin to see you as someone who helps them think, which is the foundation of real influence.

It is a small change in wording. The change in how you are perceived is anything but.

If repositioning yourself from service provider to strategic partner is the shift you are working on, that is exactly the ground I cover with data leaders in my coaching.

Free resources:
Data Leadership Playbook · Data Career Compass · Data Leader Assessment

Tristan Burns
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