Influence change through a cultural mindset shift towards utilising data

In our earlier piece, Change Starts With People, we laid out a fundamental truth: no matter how advanced your data stack is, your organisation won’t truly see the value of an enterprise wide data strategy without a cultural shift. You are the data leadership, so how do you actually make that shift happen? How do you move your data team from the back office to the executive table?

This article is for data leaders and transformation champions who are tired of shouting into the void. If you’ve ever felt like your team is doing valuable work that nobody sees, this is for you. The good news? Culture can be changed, and you don’t need to wait for a top-down mandate. You can start where you are, with what you have. Here’s how.

Stakeholder management is key

  • Start by identifying the real influencers in your organisation. This includes obvious stakeholders—like your CFO, COO, or Chief Product Officer—but also those with strong informal networks: your “cultural carriers.”

    Create a stakeholder map:

    • Who influences decisions?
    • Who controls budgets?
    • Who is curious but cautious?
    • Who might resist change?

    Then build a stakeholder engagement plan. Schedule one-on-one conversations. Understand their pain points. Don’t pitch data or talk technical, first understand their problem and then understand how you can help solve their problems. Need more help then look at MindManager

Build a data community, to strengthen your voice

A cultural shift doesn’t happen in a silo. Start small by creating a cross-functional data community:

  • Invite analysts, business SMEs, IT leaders, and process owners. Anybody that is keen to see the business data enabled.
  • Hold informal monthly meetups (in-person or virtual).
  • Ask community members to share wins and lessons learned.
  • Discuss real business problems, not tooling. Work on problems together.

This community becomes your amplifier. As excitement grows, so does the internal demand for data support—and senior leaders take notice when their teams start asking for your help.

“Knowledge is power” – Sir Francis Bacon, 1597

A different take on Sir Francis Bacon’s quote and how it is widely used to state that holding and retaining knowledge over people is power. In business this probably means that you are an island and not everybody understands your true value. By sharing your knowledge and enriching people in your organisation you are letting people know that you can support them in their objectives, making your business value increase.

  • By appointing data stewards or champions within each team or department, you are essentially giving the data a ‘guardian’. These stewards are responsible for the data’s quality, consistency, and usability within their domains, ensuring that it aligns with the organization’s goals. Together with the data stewards you can build one way of working together.
  • Value: Ensures data integrity, reliability, and usability, leading to trust in decision-making processes. Again always moving towards building a source of trusted data for all. A single source of truth is not one database, but more of a statement in the ways of working. We will all follow this way and it will become the single source of truth.
  • Example: A data steward in the HR department ensures that employee data remains consistent, accurate, secure, and updated. This results in smoother internal operations, from benefits distribution to talent management. Everyone who relies on HR data will benefit from using this improved data.

The three rules of value awareness: Communicate, Communicate and Communicate

You need to market your wins. Most data teams are too quiet. Make internal comms your best friends, ask them for help in:

  • Sharing impactful stories, not stats, nor exhibitions of technical prowess. “How data helped ops save 8 hours a week” is more memorable than “report usage increased by 12%.” or “We integrated 34 data sources together into one large dataset”
  • Use visual storytelling. Before/after visuals or quick video walkthroughs are gold.
  • Publish a quarterly data newsletter with case studies, quotes, and recognition. This can be used by your community to widen the understanding of the opportunities for data to improve the business.

Show impact an enterprise data strategy can have upon the business. Ensure that you keep clarity and consistency in your messaging and make sure it speaks business language, not technical jargon.

Skills, Competencies and Learning – building a foundation into a strong house.

If you want culture to scale, embed it in onboarding, performance reviews, and career and skills pathways.

  • Create a skills pathway for all technical roles in partnership with HR, do not forget the soft skills. Create succession plans and let people know where they can start and how they can take their skills to the next level.
  • Help L&D define what competencies should be acquired for analysts and enthusiasts across all functions.
  • Create learning cafes and lunch and learns on popular topics and systems to upskill the organisation.

This isn’t a data initiative. It’s a people initiative with data as the lever. Making your team the experts that people come to solve problems and accelerate value.

No matter how good your data department is, it is important for all to understand the value and build a community that wants to increase their skills and learning to drive further value from the business.

If you want to discuss some more about this topic or any of my other articles relating to change management then please speak to me at Data Value Creation Ltd.