#182 Inspiring Teams, Culture and Talent with Michelle Pinheiro, Kathryn Gulifa, and Dr Michelle-Joy Low

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In this episode, Felipe is joined by three special guests and pioneers of data and analytics in Australia. In celebration of International Women’s Day 2022 we tackled the trifecta of tough topics in the data analytics community right now – teams, culture, and talent.

Often we hear that the data and the tech, even the analytics itself, are the easy part. People, engagement, and culture matter the most. If the shiny tools just sit on a shelf, with a disengaged audience then no one wins. What does it take to turn that around? Right now, we're exploring the limits of organisation-wide data literacy. Inside organisations, we want to change how decisions are made, but as yet it's not clear how much expertise people are willing to acquire as part of their day job. It takes a culture that will encourage and support that growth, teams that can flourish beyond siloes and the ability to find in-demand talent.

This show includes such a great discussion full of insight and real-world application.
You can catch even more from two of our fantastic guests, Michelle-Joy (MJ) and Kathryn, at our Advancing AI event taking place at the Crown Promenade Melbourne on 6-7 April. Register here to catch up with Felipe, MJ and Kathryn in-person: https://bit.ly/3HL8Iv1

Thanks to our sponsor Talent Insights Group!

““For many data scientists that are at the top of their profession there is a lot of frustration, there’s a lot of hope. And they join organisations, and they want to be part of changing the organisation, and they can see it, and they can taste it, but they can’t actually make it happen.””

— Michelle Pinheiro, Acting Global Chief Data Officer at ANZ

Episode Highlights

If we are building a machine learning team, without a method towards where it goes, where it's going, then we would have created a hammer in search of a nail. And so really, what is it we're trying to develop? And what is our methodology? What are the qualities that we're looking for towards that outcome when looking for people and building capability in that space?

Something that is universally helpful is cultivating the discipline to work backwards starting from the company strategy and working backwards to figure out where you will and won't be leveraging data. And that therefore informs the shape of the analytics team and capability. Because it's important to build one that's got longevity and clear business outcomes.

Ideally, a data strategy should then inform a data capability strategy for the organisation. And then that strategy would speak to the design of the workforce and the roles and the capabilities and the skills that are required to be able to enable that data strategy.

It's not just about being in data for the sake of it, they actually want to be able to help transform the business units that they’re within. And so having a common goal, and having success insight for them is really, really important, and then be able to have a progression of those goals. And having teams being able to work together towards that with some degree of commonality. If you don't have that you have team siloing, you have competitiveness, and then you start to create disunity, and it becomes it can become a non-motivating experience for some people across those teams.

Sometimes you do have to build for today as well because you can get a bit of headache, yourself recruiting, these modern leading-edge analytics capabilities if you don't have the platform ready for them today, they will move on really quickly.

So much around agency and control and, you know, having a sense of ownership about your work. And the fact that the last few years, especially is has really shifted to what that looks like, and what I think is people are motivated and curious when they can bring their whole selves to work.

What can organisations do to achieve the best performance out of the talent they can attract, with these qualities in mind that we want to foster in the talent.

Being really clear on a value proposition is absolutely key.

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