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I’ll be attending and hosting a round table at the CDO BFSI Exchange in London in November. This is an invitation only event for CDOs in the UK Banking Financial and Insurance sectors. If you’re interested in attending, head here to grab a copy of the event brochure!

Looking forward to seeing you there!

💥 Data leadership hiring is broken

Let’s talk about a problem that’s quietly poisoning the well of the entire data industry.

The way organisations hire data leaders is fundamentally broken.

Most job descriptions for senior data roles read like a shopping list of technical requirements: cloud platforms, governance frameworks, machine learning, dashboards, warehouses, pipelines, lakes, meshes, and whatever the latest shiny acronym happens to be.

The underlying message is clear:

And so, that’s exactly what companies get.

They hire technical leaders who’ve spent years mastering the art of delivery. People who know how to design scalable architectures, migrate data to the cloud, and spin up a new BI platform.

But here’s where it starts to hurt: once they’re in the role, those same leaders are judged not on the quality of the platforms they build, but on the impact those platforms have on the business (aka cash money in most cases).

Eighteen months later, the CFO is asking the same question every CFO eventually asks:

And that’s when the wheels come off in a devastating fashion.

The data leader was hired to deliver a technical outcome, not a business one. They’ve been building pipelines when they should have been building influence. They’ve been optimising storage costs when they should have been optimising business decisions.

It’s not that they’ve failed. It’s that they were set up to fail from the very start.

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🔄 The cycle of broken expectations

Here’s how it usually plays out:

1. The company decides it needs to “get serious about data”.

2. They draft a job description focused on tools and technical capability.

3. They hire a technically brilliant leader who builds the technical foundations.

4. The exec team applauds... until they realise the business still isn’t more data-driven or moving in the right direction strategically.

5. They lose patience, blame the data leader, and start the cycle all over again - having learnt Sweet FA.

And with each spin of the wheel, our industry’s credibility takes another hit. Data gets seen less as a strategic enabler and more as a costly, complex, never-ending project that doesn’t deliver much in return. Just more pain.

When this happens across multiple organisations (and it does), it creates a systemic perception problem. Data is viewed as a cost centre rather than a growth engine. The technical bias in hiring decisions has built an entire ecosystem of well-intentioned leaders who are doing exactly what they were asked to do... just not what the business needed them to do.

🔀 The double whammy: hiring managers and data leaders

The problem isn’t just on one side of the table.

On one hand, hiring managers keep making the same mistake when they equate data leadership with technical competence. They want strategic influence, but they’re hiring for technical mastery. It’s like expecting to win Formula 1 races by recruiting a mechanic to do the driving because they “know cars better”.

On the other hand, data professionals themselves often reinforce this cycle. Many of them believe that their value lies in what they build rather than what they enable. That mindset is deeply ingrained in the culture of data work, where success has traditionally been measured in dashboards deployed, pipelines built, and queries optimised.

But technical outputs don’t automatically translate into strategic outcomes.

‼️ Why this matters more than ever

The longer this continues, the more damage it does to the perception of data leadership. It makes the role look risky, high-turnover, and ultimately dispensable.

The truth is, businesses aren’t running out of patience because they hate data. They’re running out of patience because they can’t see the value in what’s being delivered.

And until more data leaders start positioning themselves as strategic partners who can help the business achieve its most important goals through data, the cycle won’t break.

🛣️ So where do we go from here?

If you’re already in a data leadership role, the first step is awareness. Recognise that you might have been hired for the wrong reasons, and that this not your fault. But it is however your responsibility to course-correct.

Start spending less time talking about data infrastructure and more time talking about business impact. Translate data work into commercial value. Make it clear how your team’s work supports the organisation’s biggest bets.

The data leaders who will survive and thrive over the next five years won’t be folks who’ve built the most advanced technical environments. Those folks will be long gone. The survivors will be the ones who tie every data initiative back to a clear business outcome and help their organisations win.

The future of data leadership lies with the ones who bridge the gap between data and strategy.

And until hiring managers start to value that over certifications and cloud credentials, we’ll keep repeating this same broken loop.

But if you’re reading this, you’ve already got an advantage. You’ve seen the trap. And that means you can start leading differently.

So start today.

Tristan Burns

Find me on LinkedIn or Book a 1:1 call