The 2025 Ideas That Stuck
I’ve been a little slow with newsletters the last few weeks as the end of the year had me totally slammed and I got more and more behind with fewer and fewer hours to catch up on. You’ll be glad to know the break for the holidays has allowed me to rebuild my idea pipeline.
In January, we’ll start fresh with a review of what we really mean when we talk about “data leadership.” For this last round of 2025, though, I want to give you a little summary of the things that have resonated this year. Links included in case you missed them or want to read more.
Why I Only Give 75% At Work
Running at 110% turns you and your team into a reactive dashboard factory. You’re always busy, always responding, but rarely doing work that changes decisions. I try to hold myself closer to 75% capacity so there’s room to think, to say no when it matters, and to turn requests into better questions instead of more frantic output.
Your Team Doesn’t Need You As Much As You Think
No really. They can fend for themselves. I used to be overprotective of my team, filtering problems down until they were neat, safe, and easy to consume. The unintended consequence was slower growth. People get better by wrestling with real problems, making mistakes, and figuring things out, with support nearby but not hovering.
What the F*** Does More Analytics Mean?
“More analytics” is rarely a literal request for additional charts or metrics. It’s usually a signal that whatever you’re delivering isn’t helping someone make a decision yet. When stakeholders don’t see how your work connects to their choices, they ask for more data, and learning to decode that signal is how you move from reporting to advising.
Bonus follow-up: A Real-ish Example of More Analytics
Why You Should Volunteer To Share Bad News
Bad news is unavoidable, and trying to soften it or delay it usually does more damage than good. Sharing it early and plainly, then moving quickly into context, tradeoffs, and next steps, is one of the fastest ways to build trust and show that you can handle reality, not just summarize numbers.
Run Your Calendar or Your Calendar Runs You
If you want to understand how giving 75% is even possible, your calendar is the place to start. Treat it like a product you actively manage, not a dumping ground for other people’s priorities, and you create space for the kind of focus and thinking that analytical work actually requires.
The Best Dashboard I Ever Built Is Ugly
It’s not pretty, and it was never meant to be, but it’s still in use years later because it solves one painful problem reliably in the exact workflow people already live in. If you want dashboards that last, usefulness will always beat aesthetics, even if it means living with a few ugly charts.
Sometimes How You Dress Matters More Than Your Dashboard
Long before anyone sees your analysis, they’re picking up on signals about whether to take you seriously. Things like how you show up, how consistent you are, and whether your behavior matches what you say you care about. If you want to be treated like a strategic partner instead of “the data person,” you need to learn those signals matter more than most people like to admit.
If there’s a common thread running through all of these, it’s that technical skill is table stakes. What actually determines impact is how you manage time, attention, trust, and people… And that includes yourself.
We’ll dig into that more directly in January. See you next year!