Management tips are useful for anyone, but they can be especially helpful for data scientists. Data scientists have the unique challenge of trying to communicate to their superiors and peers about data – which is very hard to talk about. The field of data science often attracts introverts who prefer to avoid communication. Then, when forced to communicate with data – especially with non-technical managers – there are foreseeable obstacles.
Management Tips for Work and Personal Life
At our recent mentoring program meetup, I went over some management tips I had collected over the years that I have found helpful for communicating in data science. Some of these management tips are easy to apply right away, but others involve skills you have to actually practice to gain. I will summarize a few of them here.
Management Tips for Communication – Logos vs. Pathos
First, I defined logos vs pathos communication. Logos communication means communication about facts that are cut and dried, like specific times, dates, or places. On the other hand, pathos communication is laden with emotion.
Next, I defined synchronous communication – which is communication between people that is happening simultaneously, such as having a meeting, or talking on the phone or through videoconference. This is opposed to asynchronous communication, where one person sends a message, and another responds. This is the situation with e-mail, texting, and messaging boards.
Third, I went on to explain that logos messages are best delivered asynchronously, and pathos messages should be delivered in synchronously. In fact, if pathos messages show up in an asynchronous medium (such as along an e-mail chain), unless you switch to synchronous communication, the issue will likely not got resolved.
See Monika’s explanation of choice of communication medium for pathos vs. logos messages
Conversation Getting Heated? Try Active Listening!
Management tips that you can you use in your personal life include building the skills involved in “active listening”. If you use active listening skills when conversing with another person, they feel heard and validated. Active listening forces you to actually listen to what someone else is saying when they are talking, and not zone out while thinking about what you are going to say next. Instead, when they are done talking, you should try to reflect back to them what you understand of what they just said – especially about how they feel, or why they are behaving the way they are.
Hear Monika’s story of how she used “active listening” to calm down a distraught employee
If You or Someone Else is Grouchy….HALT!
The HALT principle is a set of management tips that can be applied to adults or children, anywhere, at any time, when someone is being grouchy, or just generally feeling in a bad mood. The goal is to find the source of the bad mood. The word “halt” literally means, “stop” – meaning that the first thing you should do is stop and think about the reason for the bad mood.
HALT is also an acronym which stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely and Tired. So if someone is grouchy (including you), stop and ask:
- Are they grouchy because they are hungry? Because if they are, the solution is easy – feed them.
- Are they grouchy because they are angry about something in particular? Then you can devote attention to talking about that particular topic.
- Are they grouchy because they are lonely? If so, you can help them seek out some activity that will make them feel less lonely.
- Are they grouchy because they are tired? If so, you can help arrange for them to get some rest.
Hear Monika explain how to use the HALT principle in your daily life.
Negotiate Win-Win Solutions by Focusing on Interests
I learned a whole boatload of management tips when I read the book, “Getting To Yes” by Roger Fisher and William Ury. The entire book (which is short and very readable) talks about how to improve your negotiation skills. I realized back when I originally read the book that we use negotiation skills more often than we realize in daily life and interactions with family and friends. So after I adopted those management tips from this book, I saw my ability to have successful negotiations and win-win situations greatly increase.
An excellent point that resonates throughout the book is that when negotiating, it is best to focus on “interests”, which are the goals, wants, needs, and desires behind the negotiation – not the actual subject of negotiation. I gave the example that when I moved from Florida to Boston and wanted to sell my car, my interest was to sell it fast – I wasn’t trying to make money on it. However, other people selling their cars might have an interest in making money, or in ensuring that it goes to just the right owner. If individuals in a negotiation declare their interests up front, then it can be very easy to craft the terms of the negotiation.
Watch Monika explain how negotiating based on interests makes the negotiation go faster and better.
The Power of “I” Statements
Have you ever thought of how you feel when someone talks to you with sentences starting with the word “you”, such as: “You are behind in your work, and now you are delaying all of us”? It’s hard not to feel attacked if someone comes at you with a bunch of “you” sentences all at once.
However, if you restate these sentences starting with “I”, you can immediately grasp the power of an “I” statement: “I am getting delayed because my work depends on yours, and the work I need to be completed from you so I can do my work is not yet done.” It forces you to own what you are saying, rather than shove it off onto the other person, as if it is their fault that you feel the way you do about the situation.
Updated March 23, 2023. Revised banners June 18, 2023.
Watch Monika’s story of how she diffused a random irate business guy with her “I” statements.
Read all of our data science blog posts!
Apply Weights? It’s Easy in R with the Survey Package!
Apply weights to get weighted proportions and counts! Read my blog post to learn how [...]
Nov
Make Categorical Variable Out of Continuous Variable
Make categorical variables by cutting up continuous ones. But where to put the boundaries? Get [...]
Nov
Remove Rows in R with the Subset Command
Remove rows by criteria is a common ETL operation – and my blog post shows [...]
Oct
CDC Wonder for Studying Vaccine Adverse Events: The Shameful State of US Open Government Data
CDC Wonder is an online query portal that serves as a gateway to many government [...]
Jun
AI Careers: Riding the Bubble
AI careers are not easy to navigate. Read my blog post for foolproof advice for [...]
Jun
Descriptive Analysis of Black Friday Death Count Database: Creative Classification
Descriptive analysis of Black Friday Death Count Database provides an example of how creative classification [...]
Nov
Classification Crosswalks: Strategies in Data Transformation
Classification crosswalks are easy to make, and can help you reduce cardinality in categorical variables, [...]
Nov
FAERS Data: Getting Creative with an Adverse Event Surveillance Dashboard
FAERS data are like any post-market surveillance pharmacy data – notoriously messy. But if you [...]
Nov
Dataset Source Documentation: Necessary for Data Science Projects with Multiple Data Sources
Dataset source documentation is good to keep when you are doing an analysis with data [...]
Nov
Joins in Base R: Alternative to SQL-like dplyr
Joins in base R must be executed properly or you will lose data. Read my [...]
Nov
NHANES Data: Pitfalls, Pranks, Possibilities, and Practical Advice
NHANES data piqued your interest? It’s not all sunshine and roses. Read my blog post [...]
Nov
Color in Visualizations: Using it to its Full Communicative Advantage
Color in visualizations of data curation and other data science documentation can be used to [...]
Oct
Defaults in PowerPoint: Setting Them Up for Data Visualizations
Defaults in PowerPoint are set up for slides – not data visualizations. Read my blog [...]
Oct
Text and Arrows in Dataviz Can Greatly Improve Understanding
Text and arrows in dataviz, if used wisely, can help your audience understand something very [...]
Oct
Shapes and Images in Dataviz: Making Choices for Optimal Communication
Shapes and images in dataviz, if chosen wisely, can greatly enhance the communicative value of [...]
Oct
Table Editing in R is Easy! Here Are a Few Tricks…
Table editing in R is easier than in SAS, because you can refer to columns, [...]
Aug
R for Logistic Regression: Example from Epidemiology and Biostatistics
R for logistic regression in health data analytics is a reasonable choice, if you know [...]
1 Comments
Aug
Connecting SAS to Other Applications: Different Strategies
Connecting SAS to other applications is often necessary, and there are many ways to do [...]
Jul
Portfolio Project Examples for Independent Data Science Projects
Portfolio project examples are sometimes needed for newbies in data science who are looking to [...]
Jul
Project Management Terminology for Public Health Data Scientists
Project management terminology is often used around epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and health data scientists, and it’s [...]
Jun
Rapid Application Development Public Health Style
“Rapid application development” (RAD) refers to an approach to designing and developing computer applications. In [...]
Jun
Understanding Legacy Data in a Relational World
Understanding legacy data is necessary if you want to analyze datasets that are extracted from [...]
Jun
Front-end Decisions Impact Back-end Data (and Your Data Science Experience!)
Front-end decisions are made when applications are designed. They are even made when you design [...]
Jun
Reducing Query Cost (and Making Better Use of Your Time)
Reducing query cost is especially important in SAS – but do you know how to [...]
Jun
Curated Datasets: Great for Data Science Portfolio Projects!
Curated datasets are useful to know about if you want to do a data science [...]
May
Statistics Trivia for Data Scientists
Statistics trivia for data scientists will refresh your memory from the courses you’ve taken – [...]
Apr
Management Tips for Data Scientists
Management tips for data scientists can be used by anyone – at work and in [...]
Mar
REDCap Mess: How it Got There, and How to Clean it Up
REDCap mess happens often in research shops, and it’s an analysis showstopper! Read my blog [...]
Mar
GitHub Beginners in Data Science: Here’s an Easy Way to Start!
GitHub beginners – even in data science – often feel intimidated when starting their GitHub [...]
Feb
ETL Pipeline Documentation: Here are my Tips and Tricks!
ETL pipeline documentation is great for team communication as well as data stewardship! Read my [...]
Feb
Benchmarking Runtime is Different in SAS Compared to Other Programs
Benchmarking runtime is different in SAS compared to other programs, where you have to request [...]
Dec
End-to-End AI Pipelines: Can Academics Be Taught How to Do Them?
End-to-end AI pipelines are being created routinely in industry, and one complaint is that academics [...]
Nov
Referring to Columns in R by Name Rather than Number has Pros and Cons
Referring to columns in R can be done using both number and field name syntax. [...]
Oct
The Paste Command in R is Great for Labels on Plots and Reports
The paste command in R is used to concatenate strings. You can leverage the paste [...]
Oct
Coloring Plots in R using Hexadecimal Codes Makes Them Fabulous!
Recoloring plots in R? Want to learn how to use an image to inspire R [...]
Oct
Adding Error Bars to ggplot2 Plots Can be Made Easy Through Dataframe Structure
Adding error bars to ggplot2 in R plots is easiest if you include the width [...]
Oct
AI on the Edge: What it is, and Data Storage Challenges it Poses
“AI on the edge” was a new term for me that I learned from Marc [...]
Jun
Pie Chart ggplot Style is Surprisingly Hard! Here’s How I Did it
Pie chart ggplot style is surprisingly hard to make, mainly because ggplot2 did not give [...]
Apr
Time Series Plots in R Using ggplot2 Are Ultimately Customizable
Time series plots in R are totally customizable using the ggplot2 package, and can come [...]
Apr
Data Curation Solution to Confusing Options in R Package UpSetR
Data curation solution that I posted recently with my blog post showing how to do [...]
Apr
Making Upset Plots with R Package UpSetR Helps Visualize Patterns of Attributes
Making upset plots with R package UpSetR is an easy way to visualize patterns of [...]
4 Comments
Apr
Making Box Plots Different Ways is Easy in R!
Making box plots in R affords you many different approaches and features. My blog post [...]
Mar
Convert CSV to RDS When Using R for Easier Data Handling
Convert CSV to RDS is what you want to do if you are working with [...]
Mar
GPower Case Example Shows How to Calculate and Document Sample Size
GPower case example shows a use-case where we needed to select an outcome measure for [...]
Feb
Querying the GHDx Database: Demonstration and Review of Application
Querying the GHDx database is challenging because of its difficult user interface, but mastering it [...]
Feb
Variable Names in SAS and R Have Different Restrictions and Rules
Variable names in SAS and R are subject to different “rules and regulations”, and these [...]
Feb
Referring to Variables in Processing Data is Different in SAS Compared to R
Referring to variables in processing is different conceptually when thinking about SAS compared to R. [...]
Jan
Counting Rows in SAS and R Use Totally Different Strategies
Counting rows in SAS and R is approached differently, because the two programs process data [...]
Jan
Native Formats in SAS and R for Data Are Different: Here’s How!
Native formats in SAS and R of data objects have different qualities – and there [...]
Jan
SAS-R Integration Example: Transform in R, Analyze in SAS!
Looking for a SAS-R integration example that uses the best of both worlds? I show [...]
Dec
Dumbbell Plot for Comparison of Rated Items: Which is Rated More Highly – Harvard or the U of MN?
Want to compare multiple rankings on two competing items – like hotels, restaurants, or colleges? [...]
2 Comments
Sep
Data for Meta-analysis Need to be Prepared a Certain Way – Here’s How
Getting data for meta-analysis together can be challenging, so I walk you through the simple [...]
Jul
Sort Order, Formats, and Operators: A Tour of The SAS Documentation Page
Get to know three of my favorite SAS documentation pages: the one with sort order, [...]
Nov
Confused when Downloading BRFSS Data? Here is a Guide
I use the datasets from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) to demonstrate in [...]
2 Comments
Oct
Doing Surveys? Try my R Likert Plot Data Hack!
I love the Likert package in R, and use it often to visualize data. The [...]
2 Comments
Oct
I Used the R Package EpiCurve to Make an Epidemiologic Curve. Here’s How It Turned Out.
With all this talk about “flattening the curve” of the coronavirus, I thought I would [...]
Mar
Which Independent Variables Belong in a Regression Equation? We Don’t All Agree, But Here’s What I Do.
During my failed attempt to get a PhD from the University of South Florida, my [...]
Aug
Management tips for data scientists can be used by anyone – at work and in your personal life! Get the details in my blog post.
