2018 Women in Analytics Conference https://www.womeninanalytics.org/ Setting up a successful analytics team with the objective of asking and answering any hypothesis based questions is a bit like running a farm. Two fundamental principles of your (data) farm: it’s important the farm has a mission that everyone buys into and to which everyone can contribute andits imperative that your fields (of research) are always in slightly different states from planning to harvesting. This talk will focus on approaches to creating and maintaining an effective and successful analytics team, defined simply as people working together in a committed, interdependent way where team members share responsibility and hold themselves accountable for attaining the results. I will cover the elements of an effective team, from establishing an environment of psychological safety to structure and clarity of purpose, what an effective team member looks like, how to find and cultivate him or her and how to avoid the Apollo syndrome. Sustaining your farm while its growing is just as imperative as its growth, and thus we will also discuss the value of the daily stand-up and the use project retrospectives so next seasons crops are even better. This talk is for anyone interested in building a happy, productive analytic group and data farm of any size.

1. Building a Working Farm: Planning
and Planting for a Successful
Analytics Team and Culture
Lara Sucheston-Campbell, MS, PhD
Associate Professor of Pharmacy and Veterinary Medicine
Associate Director, Mathematical Biosciences Institute
The Ohio State University

2. Resources
Your farm
Creating your team
Creating and maintaining
your team and culture
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3. A brief introduction
I’m a Engineer (MS, Industrial Engineering-
Operations Research) turned Genetic
Epidemiologist (PhD - Genetic and
Molecular Epidemiology)
Finding & identifying genes related to
getting cancer or treatment response.
2007-2016 –Assistant then Associate
Professor, University of Buffalo/Roswell Park
Cancer Institute
2016 –Associate Professor, The Ohio State
University
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4. Genetics and Epidemiology of Myeloid
Malignancies (GEMM) Consortium
Motivation:
▶5 year survival rate for Acute Myeloid
Leukemia (AML) is 27%
▶Little is known about AML risk factors,
including the role of genetics.
▶To overcome this barrier, we formed GEMM
to unite investigators world-wide and pool
data and resources.
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5. Determining Influence of Susceptibility
COnveying Variants Related to 1 Year
survival after Blood or Marrow Transplant
(DISCOVeRY-BMT)
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Motivation:
▶1 year survival rate for leukemia patients treated
with BMT is ~65%
▶HLA Genetics is the biggest predictor of survival,
the rest of the genome is underexplored
▶To overcome this barrier, we formed DISCOVeRY-
BMT to unite investigators world-wide and pool data
and resources to find other important genes and
improve survival
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6. Congratulations you have a PhD!
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Here’s some (a lot of) money
And…GO!

7. I did not get a PhD in this…
Cocktail conversations with successful female scientists
Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific
Management for Postdocs and New Faculty
http://www.hhmi.org/developing-scientists/making-right-move
Work Rules! Laszlo Block – former SVP of People Operations
at Google
re:Work- a collection of practices, research, and ideas
from Google
 An effort by Google to help share and push forward
the practice and research of data-driven HR
https://rework.withgoogle.com/about/
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8. Filter 8
-team size
-dry lab appropriate
-money
-practical implementation
-reality

9. Team definition
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People working together in a committed
way to achieve a common goal or mission.
The work is interdependent and team
members share responsibility and hold
themselves accountable for attaining the
results.
MIT Information Services & Technology

10. Building a working farm
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CC w/C. Ambrosone
Harvest Growing Planting Planning

11. Why a farm?
Easy to visualize and plan over time.
Overall mission is implemented through a
series of small/medium/large projects.
Excellent framework for presenting results
and conclusions (research or analytics).
Growth happens through permutations of
set resources.
Economics.
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12. What will you grow?
Develop a clear vision
Developing a shared team vision does not limit
innovation.
A vision statement provides a foundation for
creativity for new directions.
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HHMI

13. My vision
My vision is that we will leverage genetics
to identify individuals at risk for
hematologic malignancies or disease
and significantly impact patient survival
after a diagnosis.
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14. What will you grow?
Implement the vision with a mission
statement
Paint with broad strokes, but also identify key
measures of success.
Provide reasoned and emotional justification.
Tie it to the values and culture of your
company.
Be clear and honest.
Create a future that distinguishes your
program from competitors.
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HHMI

15. 15
Does having a good mission
statement really work?
Work Rules! (G); Wrzesniewski & Grant
▶ Team members who are inspired have
increased productivity and happiness.
▶ Reframing tasks as opportunities to help
others, can make occupations and tasks
feel more significant and increase
motivation.

16. Me
Hires
CODING
Hire people better than you
(at something)
▶ A bad hire is toxic and drains your team’s
energy and creativity. Set the bar high, don’t
compromise, be willing to wait!
▶ Hire someone who is better than you in some
meaningful way. You’ll end up with a much
stronger team.
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Work Rules! (G)

17. 17
How to hire people better
than you (at something)
▶ Give people a reason to join your team
(mission)
▶ Everyone recruits
▶ Take a risk: Consider a trade-off by going
outside of your immediate field
▶ A computer scientist or physicist interested in
bioinformatics but without a strong biology
background.
▶ Someone with a molecular biology
background who has started self-training in R
or Perl.

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▶ Take the curious
▶ Research presentation
▶ Journal Club
▶ Chalk talk
▶ Multiple interviews across disciplines
▶ Long term incentives (aside from $)
▶ Additional conferences, trainings and
first author papers opportunities.
How to hire people better
than you (at something)

19. Definition of a Team
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People working together in a committed
way to achieve a common goal or mission.
The work is interdependent and team
members share responsibility and hold
themselves accountable for attaining the
results.
MIT Information Services & Technology
FUNCTIONAL & EFFECTIVE

20. Apollo Syndrome:
sum of the parts < whole
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Dr. Meredith Belbin discovered the Apollo
Syndrome, a condition where teams of
highly capable individuals, selected using
ability and aptitude tests, can collectively,
perform badly.

21. Apollo Teams
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▶ Teams selected using ability and aptitude
tests.
▶ They were “bound to win.”
▶ The Apollo teams often finished near the
bottom.

22. Why did they fail ?
▶ Excessive time in destructive debate.
▶ Difficulties making decisions, resulting in jobs
often being omitted.
▶ Team members acted in silos, resulting in teams
that were difficult to manage.
▶ Some teams recognized what was happening
and over compensated by avoiding
confrontation.
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23. What does the Apollo
syndrome teach us?
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HOW A TEAM WORKS MATTERS MORE THAN
WHO IS ON THE TEAM
AS MUCH AS

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Modified from Project Aristotle
What Makes an Effective Team?

25. Making your team safe, eg
lets make a Sharknado …
part 6
 Frame the work as a learning problem, not an
execution problem.
 “I may not be understanding this correctly”, “I
may miss something”, “this is why I hired people
smarter than me”.
 Ask a lot of questions about everything , eg
model
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26. Additional ways to help achieve
an effective team culture
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27. Trust
▶ Be transparent.
▶ Encourage people to think & act like
owners.
▶ Give your team an uncomfortable
amount of freedom.
▶ Expect a lot.
…but verify
Adapted from Work Rules! (G))

28. A tale of two tails: best and
worst
▶Don’t surprise people.
▶Tell them if they’re low performers and help them
learn or find new roles
▶Put your best people under a microscope to find
out—and replicate—what makes them succeed.
Work Rules! (G))

29. Short-term one time incentives:
the death of learning
Self-Determination Theory (a theory of motivation) -Attaching
incentives to tasks reduces intrinsic motivation when
incentives are removed. Adapted from Deci & Ryan; Work Rules! (G)

30. Pay unfairly and reward failure
▶ The best people are worth more than
average people.
▶ Reward failure, else you kill risk taking.
Work Rules! (G))

31. Stand up meetings
▶ Short meetings (10 mins) to start your
day. For my lab, these are only on Monday
▶ Go around the table:
▶ What are you working on?
▶ What are your goals for the week (or
today?)
▶ Are there barriers to accomplishing these
goals?
▶ How can I help?
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32. You will do the same or a similar work again, what
worked and what did not?
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A look back: the role of the
Retrospective

33. The take home
▶ Have a team mission
▶ Hire people better than you
▶ Splash time (and cash) to recruit
▶ Try something new
▶ Wait!
▶ How a team works is as important as who is on it
▶ Trust a scary amount…but verify
▶ Looks at your tails
▶ Long term not short term incentives
▶ Pair unfairly
▶ Reward failure
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34. Thank you
for
listening!
Questions?
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