Special thanks to webinar moderator Antoinette Staples, Senior Director of Customer Insights and Success at McKesson.
To Lead, Guide, or Enable
The second session features a discussion with Anya Greengauz from Ameriprise Financial. She presents a framework for small insights teams to manage high demand with limited capacity by categorizing work into three levels: lead, guide, or enable. What happens when you have a very small, thin, lean team? The organization expects a lot of support, but the team does not have unlimited capacity. The answer cannot be to say yes to everything because that weakens the quality of the work.
Greengauz relates: “It cannot be a step away completely because the team’s voice is important in the decision making. I wanted to share some practical ways that our team at Ameriprise has scaled involvement that has been tried and tested and true and has worked really well for our small and mighty team. The goal is to decide ultimately should the insights team lead, where should the team lead and guide, and where the team should focus and stay connected. The core idea is simple. Small teams can still have a very significant influence when you’re deliberate about where you focus and how you stay connected.
There are three main questions that help determine the right level of involvement on any given research request. Before committing any resources though, I ask these three main questions specifically to move the conversation away from who’s asking or how urgent the requests are towards the value of that decision. Is this the key organizational priority? In other words, I look for a clear connection to the enterprise or business unit or even leadership priority that has been manifested or talked through in the quarterly or town halls, and so on.
A request can be important to an individual stakeholder without being a strategic priority for an organization. When a connection is weak, we can still help, but the level of support should be smaller. Another question we ask is, how will the business act differently with this research? I want to know the decision owner, the timing of the decision and what could change because of the findings. Will the business change a product or a message or client experience or process or investment? If the answer is simply that the research would be interesting to know or be supplemental or kind of a nice to have, well, that’s assigned to nail the scope of work or use existing secondary research.
Thirdly, we ask how much of an impact could the research create if the impact is broader than immediate revenue. It may include reducing risk, improving client or advisor experience, avoiding important investment, building strategic knowledge, influencing a decision that affects a large audience. I also consider the cost of getting decisions. We read all of these answers and talk through it and make sure this makes sense and then how the answers translate into the support.”
Asking the Right Questions
We lead or decide to take on the project when all three answers are strong and the research team adds a unique value. We guide when the work matters but does not require full ownership. We may shape the approach, review key materials or even join this in decision checkpoints. And then we enable when the likely value is limited and the work maybe is repeatable, it’s a track of some sorts that they have done before and want to continue doing. We provide templates, maybe past learnings, previous research that’s similar and can answer the question or be a proxy. We’ll use some tools or even targeted advice or maybe even secondary research.
This is the framework and it’s practical in the sense that you can ask those questions. Granted, sometimes the answers are not as clear or the answers are not as direct or transparent. But it could at least help direct you in how to decide how much resources would be allocated from your team on it. This framework is very useful to us because it turns the capacity decisions into the transparent business conversations rather than just simply saying yes or no.
The reality is that the small team supporting large organizations always faces more demand than capacity. The risk is that we either spread ourselves too thin or withdraw from the work that still matters. Spreading too thin reduces quality and credibility. Withdrawing completely means we’re not present when decisions are made. It could be a small project that eventually evolves into something bigger.
Scaling involvement is kind of the next phase of that or next thinking about it as we think through how we work. The alternative is to vary the depth of support and that’s truly where the piece of that comes in. The work we have, we lead, we own the research strategy and the most important deliverables for the work we guide. Stakeholders may execute portions of the work while we shape the design, review critical materials and participate in some of the key decision points. We offer some reusable tools or previous research or question banks or templates and maybe even focus consultation. Thirdly, we are setting expectations.
Setting the Level of Support
So what is this doing for us? It sets expectations and the level of support should be discussed at the very beginning, not after the work is already underway. Typically, how we work with business teams around the company is we get a request and then we set up what we call a discovery or intake meeting. It’s not a yes or no. What is it that you really want to learn?
For instance, scenario one, high-priority project, limited capacity. We take responsibility for the decision that requires research expertise such as defining the learning agenda, selecting the approach, interpreting the findings. Stakeholders may coordinate logistics and draft materials using other items. We remain involved through planned checkpoints rather than owning every single delivery.
Another scenario is when it’s an important stakeholder, but not a strategic priority. We’ll still provide value, but we scale the response a little. And that way we mean maybe a one-hour consultation or review a relevant past study that maybe would be resonant to what they’re trying to achieve with this research. A recommended vendor or method, maybe even the survey template that can be repurposed or review the work of a stakeholder, has developed already and maybe has been done in the past. The goal is to help without unintentionally creating a project.
Then there’s multiple competing requests. We make tradeoffs visible. We want to make sure we’re very transparent. If we do this, then we’re using some of this information. If we don’t do this, then we’re getting this part of it. We explain which decisions are most consequential and we’ll receive a full report, what will receive lighter support or what timing is realistic. Even when stretched, we stay visible by joining milestone meetings, reviewing key outputs or sharing relevant details.
Use a consistent guide or a lead guide enable model rather than just treating every request the same. When we cannot fully resource a project and stay involved, we stay involved through clearly defined checkpoints so the insights perspective remains at the forefront or the part of that main decision.
Maintaining Influence
This is not simply creating greater efficiencies and effectiveness of the team. It is also adds on a stronger credibility and a much more consistent influence.
I wanted to share an example on how we stay consultative. On occasions when we can’t be fully involved, and it’s oftentimes probably the hardest one to say or to do because you can’t take on a full project, you know you have the process, but being consultative becomes a little bit harder. Stay consultative without automatically taking on a full research project. A business partner came to us with a request to conduct research on marketing messages to use for a new product launch. A product that’s not a unique offering of the industry, but it has got its own twist. Rather than immediately jumping into a new study, we recommended starting with some competitor analysis. What are they doing?
The first question was not what research methods should be used. It was what’s already known or what can we already learn before we start with the product research? What can we use to inform that research before we even begin? Sometimes it’s a blank slate and we don’t even know where to start. But let’s start somewhere. We reviewed public and available competitor offerings, features, positioning, pricing. We went through all of it, customer experiences. Then we connected information with existing industry intelligence or secondary research that’s available with some prior internal research.
This really helped us to distinguish between questions that are already unanswerable and already available and questions that represented true knowledge gaps. It made it a lot more efficient. We asked whether the remaining gaps were tied to a specific decision, whether the business would act differently based on the answer or whether the potential impact justified the investment.
The competitive analysis answers several initial questions, preserved research dollars and the team capacity intent of this presentation and with any potential follow up research much more focused. This is an important example of guiding rather than adding. We still added strategic value by improving decision paths even though the immediate recommendation was not to launch a full private research study. The key lesson here is the value of our insights team is not measured only by the number of studies we’ve completed, but sometimes the strongest contribution is helping the business determine whether new research is needed in the first place.
Building Trust
Doing a few of these things will create more trust than accepting every request and delivering uneven work. Very clear prioritization protects our rigor, improved stakeholder experience, strengthens reputation of the insight function as a whole. Visibility still matters.
Influence does not require ownership of every task. It does require staying connected to the decisions that do matter. Our short consultation, our review checkpoint and participation in some of the key meetings can really help preserve the insights voice without requiring a fully staffed project.
Strategic yeses. The strongest signal of the value is not how often we say yes, it is how fully we commit to the right type of work. When the project is strategically important, actionable, likely to create meaningful impact, we should make the commitment visible and deliver it well.
Small teams can have an outsized influence. The key is to be intentional in capacity, transparent about trade-offs and accessible even when we’re not doing all the heavy lifting. We do not have to own every single piece of the research in order to have a voice. Think about one current request that your team has just recently received. Should your team lead it, guide it, or enable it? What checkpoint would help you stay influential?”
