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They really sucked…
Yesterday I had an all-too-familiar conversation with a client of mine. They were complaining about their data team, who, from the sounds of things, suck quite badly.
They didn’t suck at the hands-on aspects of their work. They were technically solid, reliable delivery people who closed tickets, followed process, and generally did exactly what was asked of them. Albeit with a bit of attitude.
What they sucked at though was how they interacted with the wider business. It is a challenge I see data teams all over the world also sucking at.
The team avoided stakeholder conversations altogether and seemed to genuinely believe that engaging with the business was not part of their role.
Their attitude was, “I’m a data person, I do data tasks. That’s it.”
As a result, every decision, every trade off, and every moment of judgement landed squarely on my client’s - the data leader - shoulders. They were pulled into managing every priority, every stakeholder conversations, firefighting escalations, and was still expected to operate alongside their peers as a strategic leader.
Add in hands-on technical work and constant context switching, they were utterly overwhelmed.
They asked me a simple question that I often hear from data leaders:
“How do I get my team to be more proactive and closer to the business, so that I can focus where I need to?”
Unfortunately, this pattern shows up when teams are expected to operate with judgement and autonomy, but have never been given a clear structure for doing so. When that gap exists, even highly capable people default and fall back on to what they’re already good at: process and tickets.
These challenge occur regardless of teams structures as well (I wrote about these yesterday)
Over time that quietly erodes both performance and sanity and create enormous headaches for ambitious data leaders.
Let’s take a look 👇🏻
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The challenges this dynamic raises
When teams default to passivity and wait for work to arrive in the form of tickets, the consequences tend to show up slowly at first, then all at once.
Here’s are the impacts we typically see from this. I imagine some of you are already feeling a few of these:
The data leader becomes the single point of judgement for everything that matters, which means priorities, stakeholder expectations, and trade offs all bottleneck through one brain rather than being shared across the team.
Stakeholder relationships weaken over time because data teams never build enough context to anticipate business needs or spot issues early. This leaves the business feeling unsupported and the data function constantly in reactive mode.
Decision making slows to a grinding halt. It starts to rely purely on the individual leader rather than the team through shared ways of thinking. When the leader is unavailable or overloaded, progress stalls and confidence drops across the board.
Technical capability is there and is growing, but noticeable impact made to the organisation isn’t. This creates a frustrating gap where the team is objectively better than ever at delivery, yet still perceived as reactive and operational rather than strategic.
The leader’s role moves away from strategy and direction setting towards constant triage, which makes the job feel heavier, lonelier, and far less sustainable than it should be at that level. They also fail to match/achieve the level of recognition across the org as their BU peers do.
None of this happens because the team lacks talent or motivation. It happens because the team is not provided with clear expectations or frameworks for how they should engage with the business to better understand it, and the challenges it faces.
The good news is that this is fixable. Let’s take a look at how below.
Quick Poll
How would you describe your data team’s default way of working with the business?
Shifting the team from passive to proactive
Closing this gap matters because the moment your team can operate autonomously an with shared judgement, you stop being the engine that pulls everyone uphill and start becoming the leader who sets direction, like you should.
The first step is making expectations explicit with your team members, so that stakeholder engagement, prioritisation, and decision making are clearly part of the role rather than optional extras that only confident individuals attempt on their own terms. Make this a part of the performance reviews and/or OKRs.
From there, it becomes possible to give your team a common language and principals for talking about trade offs, prioritisation, impact, and value. This helps them move beyond simple task completion and start framing their work in terms of it’s associated business outcomes.
Practical structures such as simple prioritisation principles, clear escalation paths, and shared decision criteria give people something to refer to for guidance, reducing the need for constant checking and approval from you, while increasing confidence across the team.
Regular, supported exposure to stakeholder conversations helps them understand the business. Enabling team members to build this context gradually rather than being thrown into the deep end and retreating back to what they’re comfortable with: hiding being ticketing systems.
Over time, these behaviours become ingrained, good judgement spreads and pressure eventually lifts from the leader. The team starts to feel like a genuine partner rather than a delivery function. This will do wonders for their motivation too.
This is the kind of shift that rarely sticks through one off training or well intentioned reminders. It requires space, structure, and consistency, all focused on how the team actually operates day to day.
That is exactly what my Data Team Accelerator is designed to support. It gives teams a shared operating model for leadership behaviours, communication, and decision making, so that progress does not depend purely on data leaders carrying everything.
If this story felt uncomfortably familiar, you are not alone, and you are not behind. You are simply at the point where the team needs a different system to grow into the role the organisation already expects them to play.
📨 Forward this to your Head of Data (they might need it!)
💡 If this week’s topic resonated, my Data Team Accelerator program might help
A facilitated group coaching programme that helps data teams improve communication, influence and business partnership. Together we get to the heart of what is holding teams back and set a course for data-driven success. Ideal for teams ready to move from order-takers to high-impact strategic partners.
→ Learn more about The Data Team Accelerator
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Tristan Burns