Leadership

Interview with Lousin Mehrabi

Many statisticians and data scientists see themselves as introverts. Does this imply, that we are therefore bad negotiators?

What are the limitations and strength of introverts in negotiations?
What does listening really mean and why is it important for negotiations?
How do to handle different emotions during negotiations or emotional hijack?

It is important to be an effective negotiator as negotiation is all around us all the time. Whether it’s about daily life or making decisions at work as statisticians. But at as experts in this field (and being mostly introverts), we need several skills to develop and grow our negotiation skills.

Today, I talk with Lousin Mehrabi who was selected by the Schranner Negotiation Institute as one of the ‘Most Influential Negotiation Professionals Globally’! Join us while we talk about the following points:

Interview with Shanthi Sethuraman

Today, we have a special guest, Shanti. Learn while she shares with us her vast experience in the pharmaceutical industry collected over 25 years. She held various positions inside and outside of statistics organization.

Join us while we discuss the following points:

What are the 5 levels of statistician leadership?
How you can develop your leadership skills over time?

Leadership is multidimensional. It depends on lots of different skills like communication, being a good team player, building trust and relationship, negotiating conflicts, and more. The kind of leadership that I am talking about is not supervising other people or the administrative type of leadership, but it’s a type of cross functional influencing where you lead others that don’t necessarily report to you.

To simplify it, we have developed these 5 levels of statistical leadership:

Do you have a great idea you want to move forward and you need others to buy in?

Maybe you want to improve a process or implement a new analysis approach. Your business partner might be your study team or your supervisor.

Whenever, we want to change something, we usually need others to agree into the next steps.

Listen to this episode while I discuss the following important points:

Should we oversimplify statistics, or should managers learn more about statistics?

If you’ve been working as a statistician for a while, you know that you have to keep it simple if you want managers to understand you. Of course, I speak about those managers not being statisticians themselves.

There are a lot of ways to explain statistical concepts to them, but this adds time to the presentation. Sometimes there won’t even be a presentation, and all you have is sending the report via email.

From reading, from my experience, and from talking to other experienced statisticians, I have distilled the knowledge about this challenge into 5 steps.

Listen to this episode and learn about the 5 steps to present successfully to your upper management: