Managing Your Data Science Projects by Robert de Graaf

Author:Robert de Graaf
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781484249079
Publisher: Apress

Earning Trust

The highest state you can aspire to in a relationship with the people you are trying to assist is to be trusted. Trust is what ensures that your organization comes to you early with problems that need your help to solve, ensures that they give your solutions a fair hearing and implement them without trying to prove that they won’t work first.

Earning the trust of your customers and clients takes the idea of a personal brand further. Although trust is earned repeatedly within each new relationship, it is a deeper level of engagement than having a personal brand and provides a firmer foundation for future work.

Just as for the previous sections, this needs to be done with an eye on promoting people to trust your team and to trust data science as a profession that will aid their company. Trust in either yourself as an individual or trust in the idea of data science by themselves won’t be sufficient to ensure they trust your solutions to their problems.

In a later chapter we will see that ensuring that users trust your models is of paramount importance for them to be used. If your users are able to trust you on a personal level, or the model is presented to them by someone they respect who trusts you on a personal level, you will have crossed an important barrier for achieving your user’s trust in your model.

At the same time, it is more difficult to get your clients to trust you than it is to get them to trust your model—it’s just that if you are successful in getting them to trust you the pay-off is that you need to re-earn that trust every time you want to propose a new model.

Building that trust is something that will take place over a longer period of time, with a different approach. The point here is not that you provide models that do what they say on the tin by attaining a good accuracy measure or even that the models you provide develop a reputation for significantly improving the organization’s smooth running.

The famous book on building trust for consultants, The Trusted Advisor,10 defines four ingredients for personal trust—credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation. A lot of this book has to do with the first two, as these elements can apply to statistical models as well as to humans. The last two really only apply to people.

More generally, the authors of The Trusted Advisor are keen to point out that although credibility and reliability have a black and white, technical dimension (which is what I have covered in relation to models in other chapters of this book) they also have an important emotional dimension, which will not map so easily onto models, but is important for your personal credibility when trying to win over your clients or potential users.

Intimacy can be seen as more difficult to achieve than either credibility or reliability. To be credible, you just need to know your stuff. To be seen

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.