5) Speak Up Early, Stand Your Ground
You’re working with a senior colleague to analyze client sales growth in different regions to present to your manager. Your colleague is also working on another module, so you’re doing most of the work on this one while he supervises. Your performance on this will – in a very real way – determine your final performance evaluation results.
Your expected deliverable is a slide summary of trends over time split by region. You’ve spent time looking at the raw data, and now it’s time to produce the slide. Your net data looks OK, but you see some large outliers in data points here and there which throw everything off. In spite of that, your senior colleague hasn’t said anything about them.
Approach A: To meet the deadline and not create additional work for the team, you go ahead and produce the slide. You figure that it’s also your colleague’s module, he shares responsibility, and he has always been right about data and analyses you’ve done before. Besides, everyone in your team has told you to be cautious with client data and to not directly edit it.
You show the slide to your colleague, who asks you if you’re OK with the numbers. You consider mentioning the outliers, but instead you nod. At the meeting, the first thing your manager says is, “We had a few irregularities in the North and Central regions to adjust because of product returns. This takes those into account, right?” Your colleague turns and looks at you, saying, “Oh, [you] said his numbers were OK. You took that out, right?” Gulp. You shake your head.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks.
“But you saw the data too and didn’t suggest any corrections,” you stammer back.
In mere seconds, you have shown that instead of being a team player, an effective communicator, and a problem-solver, you blame others, don’t raise issues early, and don’t challenge anything even when you have reason to do so. Through this, you’ve also lopped off healthy chunks from your teamwork, communication, and problem-solving evaluation scores. Golf clap.
It will be quite a climb back to prove you can be left alone with data without someone triple-checking your work and asking you questions to make sure you’re sure.
Approach B: You find your colleague and say, “Hey, I think I see a few outliers here that are throwing off our data.”
“Come on dude, I’ve already looked at the data, it looks fine, and we have to make this slide. Can you just show me the slide when you're done?”
“Look,” you say, pointing at an outlier. “We missed it before because we were only looking only at the net figures, not the details.”
“Oh wow. I didn’t see that before. Good catch, man. Adjust the data, but remember to put a footnote on the slide saying what we did.”
At the meeting, all your manager has to say is, “There were a few adjustments to make in the North and Cent– oh, looks like you’ve already done them. Good work.” How easy and simple.
Conclusion: It will never be easy to directly challenge people who outrank you, especially the first time. However, you have to stand your ground when you’re on to something. The person in Approach A figured that his colleague would have seen the data, and he didn’t want to create trouble for anyone. Major misstep.
The person in Approach B knew that no matter the reason why the senior colleague didn’t see the outliers, he had to say something early rather than work on and present data he knew to be misleading. He challenged his superior, but he also stuck with the facts. As a junior guy, you have to be the team’s eyes and ears for whatever task you are assigned, which means delivering thoughtful analysis.
Sometimes your proposals will create extra work for people, but make it clear early on that you go by the facts and that you actively think about and propose ways to present data, and the respect and credibility you’ll earn will go a long way.
That’s all for this week, good luck out there.
no offense but that's not a challenge ! Each person reading this will have the same idea: go back and discuss the analysis done.
A real challenge would be the following : you have spotted what you think is an issue in one of the analysis performed by your manager, it's late in the evening and no one is available on site/on phone and you have to print 10 copies for tomorrow morning meeting with the client...now we're talking about real challenge :-)
antmavel, in that case, like it or not, you print out two scenarios. Then in the morning before the client meeting, you discuss quickly with the senior colleague. If he's ok with your discovery, then you use scenario 2 documentation in front of client. If he's not ok, you use scenario 1 as planned. This is what I expect from my alert underlings all the time..
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