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Welcome back!

If you haven’t heard yet, I’ve had some really exciting news. I recently signed a book deal with a publisher to write my very first business book (actually, my first book of any variety). I’ve got to remain tight lipped about any of the specifics, but I can say that it is on the broad topic of data leadership (hopefully that doesn’t come as a surprise) and it will be out sometime next year.

I’m now in my second week of writing the manuscript and I’ve decided to share my writing journey — the thrilling highs and the crushing lows — on Instagram! If you’re on that platform and want a little more of me up in your grill, drop a follow here or search for my handle: tris.j.burns.data

In this week’s edition of Strategies For Effective Data Leadership I’m diving into the important topic of Amplification. No, I’m not talking about guitar amps (thought they are cool). I’m talking about the skills we need to amplify our careers and get the attention and respect we deserve for our hard data work!

Let’s turn it up to 11 🎸🔊🤘 (Spinal Tap reference for this not in the know)

There is a deeply held belief in the data community that good work will speak for itself. Deliver great stuff and the results will be noticed.

They won't.

Or at least, not reliably or consistently. And certainly not in the way that translates into strategic influence, career progression, or organisational change, which we’re all here for right?

The reality you’re dealing with here is that in most businesses, attention is a fleeting thing. Executives are overwhelmed, stakeholders are distracted and everyone is managing competing priorities and has their own sh*t going on. If you are waiting for people to notice how good your team's work is, then you are setting yourself and your team up for operation epic failure.

Staying quiet about your contributions does not just hurt your career.

It actively harms the business. You don’t want to do that do you?

Without clear, proactive communication about what your team delivers, stakeholders cannot understand what you are capable of. They default to the most visible version of you, which is often the one firefighting requests or producing reports. That becomes your brand whether you like it or not.

When your contributions go unannounced, stakeholders do not know when to bring you into conversations early. They do not know where you add the most value. They do not know how to work with you to get the best outcomes. All of that institutional knowledge about how to engage your team productively sits locked in your head, unavailable to the people who need it most.

Amplification is not about blowing your own trumpet for the sake of it (though it accomplishes that goal too, if needed). It is about actively educating your organisation on where and how data creates value. When you do that well, you are not serving yourself. You are serving the business!!

When you don’t do it, you are harming the business.

Here is what consistently failing to amplify your work looks like in practice.

1️⃣ Your career stalls without a clear reason.
You are doing good work, but the people making decisions about promotions and strategic scope have no clear picture of your impact. Getting passed over for lack of visibility rather than lack of ability is one of the most avoidable traps in data leadership.

2️⃣ Your team's progression suffers alongside yours.
When your team's contributions are invisible to the organisation, high performers who feel unseen start looking elsewhere. You lose these great people because nobody above them ever really got to see their contributions.

3️⃣ Stakeholders keep coming to you for the wrong things.
Without a clear signal of what your team does at its best, people fill in the blanks themselves, and that usually means treating you as a reporting factory. The requests you receive reflect their assumptions about what you are for.

4️⃣ Budget and headcount conversations become much harder.
When leadership has no tangible sense of what your team has delivered, every resourcing conversation is an uphill battle. A data leader who has communicated impact consistently throughout the year walks into that same meeting with a track record. That becomes a very different conversation.

5️⃣ You cede strategic positioning to other functions.
Finance, product, and marketing all know how to tell their story internally, and when data stays silent those functions take the limelight. The business shapes its understanding of data based on what it hears from other people rather than from you.

The good news is that while this is not complicated, it does require intention, and a degree of consistency. But there is nothing here that requires a marketing degree or a personality transplant.

🔊 Understand what your audience actually cares about.

Before you communicate anything, stop and ask yourself who you are talking to and what they measure success by. A CFO cares about cost and risk. A CCO cares about retention and revenue. A COO cares about efficiency and process. The same piece of work can (and should) be framed five different ways depending on who you are talking to.

Most data leaders make the mistake of communicating in data terms to people who think in business terms. You did not just build a churn model. You gave the retention team actionable guidance on saving customers who were about to bounce.

🔊 Build a rhythm of proactive updates.

Do not wait for review cycles or board presentations to surface your team's impact. Build a lightweight habit of regular, proactive communication. Try creating a short weekly or fortnightly update to key stakeholders or a monthly summary of decisions influenced or initiatives delivered. Hell, even a brief Slack message when something important lands with do a lot more than silence will.

These don’t need to be polished or extensive, they just need to exist.

🔊 Make wins visible at the moment they happen.

When your team delivers something meaningful, tell people immediately. Do not sit on it until the next quarterly review. Send the summary. Drop the result into the relevant channel. Flag the outcome directly to the stakeholder who benefited. It’s right then in the moment that impact is most tangible and most likely to be remembered!

🔊 Spread the credit deliberately.

Amplification is not just about you. Make your team visible. Make other contributors visible as well. When an analyst solves a difficult problem or a data engineer ships something that unblocks a critical work stream, name them publicly and in the channels and conversations where it will be seen by the right people.

This does the work twice. It recognises your team and it signals to the organisation that your function is full of capable, motivated people doing important work. Both of these things matter.

🔊 Talk about what is coming, not just what has happened.

Most data communication is retrospective. Here is what we built. Here is what happened. Flip that occasionally. Tell stakeholders what you are working towards and why. Let them understand the thinking before the output arrives. This positions you as someone operating with strategic intent, not just responding to requests.

Before you can amplify effectively, it helps to have a clear picture of your current strategic positioning:

👉🏼 Where are the gaps in how you communicate?

👉🏼 Where is the organisation underestimating what your team can do?

👉🏼 Are you still being treated as a reporting function when you’re capable of more?

If you want a structured way to assess this, I have built a Data Leadership Assessment designed to help you do exactly that. It gives you a clear picture of where you are, where the gaps are, and what to prioritise next.

You can take it 100% for free here: trisjburns.com/assessment

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

Tristan Burns
Find me on LinkedIn

Last time, I asked you how you’d describe your current 1:1s with your manager. Here’s how you responded: