You Lost Your Analytics Manager. Now What?
Hopefully it was a peaceful, planned transition with sufficient time and a clear successor in place… but usually not. This departure can bring a pile of new problems onto your desk:
Potentially expensive brain drain
Highly distracted team and/or a major uptick in office politics
Major loss of time and momentum
Battle to get adequate salary allocated to the replacement
Stakeholders that you may not be able to satisfy
Battle to get the role titled properly and competitively
Realization that you are in a very competitive market for talent
Realization that this could take a while to sort out
So what should you do? Act like a European… bring in an independent consultant.
Europeans have employment contracts that often require extensive notice periods. It is not unusual for a key employee to have to wait several months before leaving to start their new job. When you add on recruiting time it can easily take over a year to refill a key analytics leadership role.
As a result, the market for independent analytics consultants is robust and mature in Europe. Companies routinely use independent consultants to man the ship until the new guy is in the chair. Stakeholders are serviced, the team is managed, projects and initiatives move ahead. Perhaps most importantly, the new guy doesn’t have to spend his first 6-months cleaning up the mess from a long-vacant role.
At home, we are mostly “at-will” employees, so our brief notice periods are just a professional courtesy. Still, when you lose your analytics manager it can often take many months to get the new guy in the chair.
The good news is that U.S. has a growing marketplace of independent analytics professionals at all levels: analyst up to interim Chief Data / Analytics Officer.
This is one of the problems that IQ Workforce can solve for our clients. We have spent the past 10-years building a network of strategy & analytics talent. About 12% of our talent network are available for independent consulting projects or interim roles. We may be the only company that can connect you with the interim analytics manager while we work on finding you the full-time analytics manager.
Maybe you can get lucky and the interim guy can turn into the full-time guy. If not, it is easy to drive ROI out of the interim analytics manager.
