Why I Got My Team Hooked on Data
From Overwhelmed to Winning: How Metrics Transformed My Team
I was a new and somewhat overwhelmed manager, suddenly responsible for multiple departments, suppliers, and a big budget at a growing startup. It felt like a lot. As a former management consultant, I was used to small, well-defined project teams - but this was different. I had to figure out where to focus, how to show progress, and prove that we weren’t just a cost center.
Things started to shift when I focused the team on metrics. We worked smarter, reclaimed our nights and weekends, and watched our impact take off. Before long, we weren’t labeled a cost center anymore; we were recognized as a key partner driving growth.
Why Data Should Matter to Managers
Without metrics, teams lose focus. They chase the “flavor of the day,” work harder instead of smarter, and eventually, burn out. And if the team can’t quantify impact, they’ll wonder why raises or promotions don’t come: “But I worked so hard!” The result? Frustration and turnover.
As a manager, your responsibility is to communicate your team’s value. If you can’t show measurable contribution, your team risks being seen as expendable, especially when budgets tighten.
Data makes that communication easier. It’s consistent, credible, and more persuasive than anecdotes.
Why Teams Win With Data
Focus: Good metrics keep teams aligned on what matters to the organization. Think of a sales team laser-focused on revenue targets.
Impact: Data can help demonstrate your team’s contribution to the organization and justify their budget.
Collaboration: Tracking progress together as a team sparks problem-solving and shared wins, even when they have different functional roles.
Communication: Regular reporting keeps your leadership informed while aligning you and your team on the priorities.
How to Get Your Team Hooked on Data
Here’s the approach I used with that team and with several others I’ve built or turned around since. Each time, we’ve had to get creative to find the right metrics. Through that experience, and plenty of observation about what truly motivates people, I’ve learned why this approach works: it helps teams communicate better, set clearer priorities, and collaborate more effectively. When those things happen, wins follow - and people love being part of a winning team.
- Choose Metrics Wisely
This is the most important step to get right because ‘what gets measured gets done.’ The wrong metrics will drive unintended behavior and will frustrate your team and your manager.
Tie metrics to the team or organizational goals. Metrics that don’t align with what matters to the business are generally a distraction and waste of time.
Use a mix of leading and lagging indicators. Revenue, for example, is a lagging metric and is driven by leading indicators such as qualified leads, sales meetings, proposals, or website traffic. Sometimes teams are assigned top-down metrics that they cannot control. Look to see if you can find leading indicators that contribute to that top-down metric.
Pick metrics that touch the largest share of your team, directly or indirectly. For example, my team of editors didn’t drive traffic themselves, but their messaging experiments helped improve conversions.
Additional considerations:
Choose metrics tied to your team’s meaningful, recurring work.
Ensure you can report reliably, ideally on a weekly or monthly cadence.
Avoid blurring priorities by choosing too many metrics.
Then explain why each metric matters. When people understand how their work connects to organization’s goals, focus and alignment follows.
- Build Repeated Exposure
Repetition builds familiarity and confidence. Review the numbers regularly (weekly or monthly) in a staff meeting or other meeting to make them part of your team’s rhythm. Over time, the metrics will feel less intimidating, and everyone will see how their work influences outcomes.
This consistency signals that these metrics matter, and your team will start prioritizing activities that drive them.
These reviews are where that cross-team collaboration and creative problem solving begins to happen as well.
- Celebrate and Solve Together
Once metrics feel natural, connect them to emotion. Celebrate wins (hello, dopamine!) and tackle challenges as a team.
Solve Together
Openly discussing progress builds creativity and collaboration, encouraging experimentation and out-of-the-box thinking. When one of my technical teammates shared an ad idea that helped our marketing manager boost click-through rates, it showed real teamwork and people thinking beyond their own roles.
People want to be part of a team that makes an impact, and nothing builds team spirit more than overcoming challenges and achieving milestones together.
Celebrate Together
Recognize momentum, not just the end goal. Everyone likes to be part of a winning team, and this is why you celebrate early and often. I am not saying that everyone should get a trophy. But celebrate progress and tie it back to the underlying efforts. Small wins build momentum for bigger wins.
For big milestones, mark the moment - a team lunch, shout-out, or early sign-off - and reflect on how far you’ve come. The story of where you started, the struggles, the learning, and where you are today - that story builds a sense of pride and belonging.
Then tell that story often. When people see these wins as attainable, they feel motivated to stretch for their own.
Make It Count: Communicate Up and Out
Share progress regularly with your boss and partners. Explain why these metrics matter and how they’re calculated. Then, when a big win comes, you can focus on how the win happened, and not why that metric is important in the first place.
Sharing your wins boosts your team’s visibility in the organization and further reinforces the addiction to the metrics.
Managing Resistance
Not everyone will love metrics right away. Some feel threatened or claim their work can’t be measured.
Listen and adjust. They may have a point - some metrics encourage bad behavior or aren’t reliable. Stay open, but firm: no metrics isn’t an option. Work together to find measures that truly reflect impact on the organization.
Test first. Pilot new metrics for a quarter. It gives time to refine and helps skeptics see the value firsthand. Once they see how the data clarifies priorities and highlights wins, buy-in tends to follow naturally.
How You Know You’ve Arrived
Some work is genuinely difficult to measure and that’s okay. Building a data-oriented culture takes experimentation, iteration, and honesty about what really matters.
You’ll know your team is hooked when the numbers start to matter to them - not just to you. They open the report as soon as it’s published (and ask for it if it’s late). They bring up metrics unprompted in hallway chats, team meetings, even over coffee. Conversations about data get lively, curious, and focused on solutions.
That’s when you know the shift has happened: your team isn’t just tracking metrics, they’re invested in them. Congratulations!
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