I’ve had the good fortune to work with a few exceptionally skilled managers over the years. Like a great editor, or a skilled coach, the best managers help you gain perspective and build on your strengths. But more than that, the best managers are authentic, sincere, and invested in ways that make interactions with them feel inspiring, yet challenging. A big part of their job is to get you OUT of your head to frame and direct your energy, which can be a bit destabilizing — and that’s a good thing.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about what I appreciate most from exceptional managers, how it plays out in day-to-day interactions, and how both have influenced my own leadership approach. What I see as impactful leadership often arises from a combination of well-timed prompts, moments of insight, and (perhaps more importantly) critical prioritizations, well-informed actions, and keen decision making. At a time when the tools at our disposal are evolving rapidly and becoming much more powerful, these skills are even more essential in the insights industry.

In that light, I’ve synthesized my thinking in the form of three driving questions I see good leaders ask as part of productive contributions to teams.

What do we need to learn?

Our value as insight providers is shifting. Many of us are increasingly asked to go beyond providing insights, recommendations, or developing design principles, to prescribe learning priorities for a team. Leadership that excels in this climate frames conversations with teams around tradeoffs and the respective value of pursuing different lines of inquiry.

Operationally, instead of asking “What do we want to learn?” or “What would be interesting to learn?” or especially “What do we need to know that would prove we’re right?” (eek!) these conversations start with organizational priorities, then determine the most critical knowledge gaps, and then understand how team needs fit into both. This is the point at which we can distill strategic research questions, the answers to which satisfy needs across these layers.

Strategically, good leadership of this variety helps move beyond simply answering questions for a team and aims toward building core foundational knowledge that helps the organization thrive. It takes deep understandings of the organization’s customer experiences, and situates that knowledge within an outside-in perspective of the organization’s position in the marketplace, to inform a strategy for identifying opportunities the organization is situated best to pursue (both physically and culturally). This is sometimes framed as identifying what’s desirable (do consumers want it?), then determining what’s viable (is it possible to meet those needs in the marketplace?), and finally, defining what’s feasible (is our organization set up to meet those needs in that market?). Each requires a different learning ‘prescription’ offered at the right time and place.

What’s the best way learn?

It may not be so coincidental that we’re seeing increased value placed in the leadership skills described above. Two major changes are happening in our industry: pace and scale; both driven in large part by large language models (LLM’s).

For pace, we’re learning that LLM’s can accelerate many processes in our workflows. Give these models a data set from which to ‘learn,’ and they can outline research or project plans, transcribe interviews, summarize vast amounts of text, identify themes and outliers, jumpstart brainstorms, create prototypes and mockups…all almost instantly. Although not without the risk of hallucination, these models are remarkably effective at pattern recognition and eliminating rote processes, which frees us to spend more time on strategic questions.

As for scale, in the very recent past many of us in the industry developed insights through methods that identified patterns from data at scales contained within discrete data sets. We might later draw connections between those insights and other broader themes, but this was most often done by association or inference. While much of this work has long been assisted by computing power, LLM’s now provide the ability to dramatically increase the scale of our work beyond a dataset or association. The scope of LLM’s can span across entire bodies of knowledge, and interpret them via highly tailored prompts, allowing us to mine for insight and identify patterns at previously unimaginable scope and scale.

Given these two changes, considerations for how our insights align with organizational strategy become ‘weightier’ in many ways. Where do we go deep? Where do we stretch across? What methods and models make the most sense? Why? With the accelerated pace and unprecedented scope and scale LLM’s offer, the risk of rapidly veering off course is now greater; and, while you could argue that we can now recover from mishaps more rapidly with these tools, we also risk flailing haphazardly without the insightful steer of solid and well-connected leaders that deeply understand and advocate for the right focus for our work.

How do we engage?

It’s easy to assume that, as insights provisioners, we’re responsible for ‘solving’ team challenges by answering questions. Yet, in the vast majority of cases, our value is far more effective when we sync and parse our insights according to the needs of our teams and the broader organization. There’s much more to consider here, but in this post, I’d like to focus on leadership. As our roles shift within organizations, our strategic value is also changing course. An engagement strategy, with a focus on timing, team alignment, and — above all — a deep integration of organizational priorities, is becoming increasingly important. This means that ‘research reports’ occupy only part of engaging with teams.

Instead, we need a mix of deliverables and outreach, applied strategically based on an understanding of the organization and its institutional culture(s). So, there may be times when it’s far more engaging and impactful to present only key pieces of raw data, or conversely, to use LLM’s to generate insights across massive knowledge bases to identify broad patterns. There may also be times when you want to gradually build on the momentum of positive relationships with close colleagues, or, make a big splash with unfamiliar coworkers by introducing a new perspective or deliverable across the organization. A leader brings value by continually gauging the environment and adapting accordingly.

When executed well, an engagement strategy can create a North Star that goes beyond ‘solving,’ to accumulate a vision for teams, de-risk bets for the organization, and build momentum around promising new opportunities. It’s rarely perfect, and it often consumes MUCH more time than anticipated.

Final Thoughts

All of this may feel a bit ‘out of scope’ for some, but without it, we risk operating rudderless (and runaway) projects with new ‘power tools’ we fail to use responsibly. By focusing on the three questions above, skilled leadership helps organizations maintain focus and framing. Are you hearing your leaders ask these questions? Are you finding yourself asking them?