Most CEOs hire data people expecting strategic insights that drive growth.

Instead, they get expensive spreadsheet jockeys who take three days to answer basic questions.

Sound familiar?

This week, I sat down with Tristan Burns, a data leadership coach who's helped Fortune 500 companies transform their data teams from service desks into strategic powerhouses. What he shared will change how you think about data leadership forever.

Here's what we discovered about why your data team isn't moving the needle—and exactly what to do about it.

The Service Desk Death Trap

Here's the brutal truth: Your data team has probably become a glorified service desk.

They sit around waiting for requests. Marketing asks for a dashboard. Sales wants a report. Finance needs some numbers for their presentation. Your data people dutifully create what's asked for, pat themselves on the back, and wonder why nobody sees them as strategic.

Meanwhile, you're hemorrhaging opportunities because nobody's asking the right questions.

I frequently observe this with my clients. They hire smart people, give them access to all the company data, and then wonder why they're not getting strategic insights. The data team becomes trapped in what I call "the spreadsheet kingdom"—one person hoarding all the knowledge, taking days to answer simple questions, creating bottlenecks instead of breakthroughs.

The problem isn't your data team's technical skills. It's that they're trained to be reactive instead of proactive.

Breaking Free: The Strategic Shift

Tristan shared a powerful framework for transforming your data team from order-takers to business drivers:

1. Create Strategic Guardrails

Don't just say "we're going strategic now." That's career suicide. Instead, establish service-level agreements that protect time for high-value work while still serving immediate needs.

2. Demand Business Context

For every request, require stakeholders to explain:

• What business decision will this inform?

• What's your hypothesis?

• How will this impact revenue, costs, or customer experience?

No hypothesis = no analysis. Period.

3. Embed with Business Units Your best data people shouldn't sit in a data silo. They should be deeply embedded with product, marketing, and operations teams, understanding daily challenges and proactively identifying opportunities.

I often tell clients: you need speed to return on investment. You can't just promise that "strategically driven insights will take the company to a better place." You need proof. Show them the thing you did last month, the result you delivered last quarter. You need escape velocity to break free from the service desk paradigm and achieve strategic impact.

The Emotional Intelligence Factor

Here's what most data leaders get wrong: They think their job is to show how smart they are.

Tristan told me about a client, a brilliant technical leader who constantly frustrated stakeholders by diving into methodology and technical details. During a coaching session, Tristan had him role-play as his most critical stakeholder.

The breakthrough was immediate: "Oh my god, they don't care about my working—they just want to know what action to take."

The school paradox strikes again.

In school, you had to show your work to get full marks. In business, executives just want the answer and the recommended action.

Here's what I see all the time: a client calls me, frustrated because they've got spreadsheets and dashboards everywhere, but when I ask, "What does your organizational strategy say?" they tell me, "No one's ever shared it with me" or "It doesn't exist."

You can't have strategic data leadership without an actual strategy to align with. That's why I always start engagements by understanding what's truly important to the business, not what they assume matters, but what actually drives revenue, profitability, and growth.

Your data leaders need to master this shift: From "here's what the data shows" to "here's what you should do about it."

The Future-Proof Strategy

Tristan made a prediction that stopped me cold: "Data professionals as we know them today won't exist in five years."

AI tools will democratize data access. Natural language processing will enable anyone to ask business questions and receive immediate answers. Your competitive advantage won't come from having people who can write SQL queries.

It will come from having people who know which questions to ask in the first place.

This hits exactly what I see with my target clients, those $10-150M businesses trying to scale further. They've grown with a "do whatever it takes" mentality, but what got them there won't get them to the next stage. They need to move from reactive data management to predictive intelligence.

The companies that make this shift can make multi-million dollar decisions in minutes, not months. Those that don't get stuck in manual reporting hell while their competitors race ahead.

This is why your data strategy needs to focus on business acumen, not just technical skills. The winners will be the leaders who understand your industry, your customers, your competitive landscape, and know how to use data to make million-dollar decisions in minutes, not months.

That's it.

Here's what you learned today:

• Most data teams are trapped in reactive service desk mode, missing strategic opportunities

• Breaking free requires guardrails, business context requirements, and embedded analysts

• Technical brilliance means nothing without emotional intelligence and business communication skills

• The future belongs to data leaders who ask better questions, not those who build better dashboards

Start by asking yourself: Does your data team wait for requests, or do they proactively identify opportunities? If it's the former, you're leaving millions on the table.

The businesses I work with that make this shift see an 80% reduction in manual reporting effort and a 3x return on their data investments. However, it begins with treating data as a strategic asset, not just a service desk.

Your data team has the potential to be your biggest competitive advantage. But only if you stop treating them like an internal IT help desk and start leveraging them as strategic business drivers.

Could you take 10 minutes this week to audit your last month of data requests? How many were reactive reports versus proactive insights that changed business decisions? If the ratio isn't at least 50/50, it's time for a strategic reset.

And whenever you are ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. [Data Transformation Assessment] - Discover exactly where your data infrastructure is holding back growth and get a roadmap to fix it.

2. Listen to the full conversation with Tristan Burns on the Scale Your Business With Data podcast and enjoy the back catalogue - available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.