Building the Influence as a Statistician in a Clinical Trial Team

March 7, 2025 by Reine

Dr. Alexander Schacht

In this episode of The Effective Statistician, I dive into a crucial skill—building influence within a clinical trial team. As statisticians, we often need to negotiate timelines, advocate for better analysis methods, and ensure clear communication across teams. The stronger our influence, the more impact we can have on study outcomes and, ultimately, patients.

I break down the key pillars of trust—care, character, and competence—and share practical strategies to help you collaborate effectively, align team priorities, and proactively tackle challenges.

Tune in and start building your influence today!

Key Points:

Building Influence
Negotiation
Trust Pillars
Collaboration
Proactivity
Impact
Actionable Strategies

Building influence as a statistician isn’t just about being heard—it’s about driving better decisions, improving team dynamics, and ultimately making a greater impact on patient outcomes. The strategies I share in this episode will help you strengthen your influence, gain trust, and collaborate more effectively.

So don’t just listen—take action! Tune in now, and if you found this valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can benefit. And if you’re serious about leveling up your leadership skills, check out the Medical Data Leaders Community (MDLC) for expert guidance and a network of like-minded professionals.

I’m thrilled to share that my book, “How to Be an Effective Statistician – Volume 1”, is now available!

It’s packed with insights to help statisticians, data scientists, and quantitative professionals excel as leaders, collaborators, and change-makers in healthcare and medicine.

Check out the testimonials and grab your copy!

Boost Your Leadership with MDLC!

The Medical Data Leaders Community (MDLC) gives you the tools and support to grow your leadership skills, expand your influence, and drive meaningful change in healthcare research. Whether you’re just starting or already leading a team, this community helps you take your career to the next level

Learn more here!

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Transcript

Building the Influence as a Statistician in a Clinical Trial Team

Alexander: [00:00:00] You are listening to The Effective Statistician Podcast, the weekly podcast with Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske designed to help you reach your potential lead great science and serve patients while having a great [00:00:15] work life balance

in addition to our premium courses on the Effective Statistician Academy. We [00:00:30] also have lots of free resources for you across all kind of different topics within that academy. Head over to www.theeffectivestatistician.com and find the [00:00:45] Academy and much more. For you to become an effective statistician.

I’m producing this podcast in association with PSI, a community dedicated to leading and promoting use of statistics within the healthcare industry [00:01:00] for the benefit of patients. Join PSI today to further develop your statistical capabilities with access to the ever-growing video on demand content library free registration to all PSI webinars and much, much more.

[00:01:15] Head over to the PSI website at www.PSIweb.org to learn more about PSI activities and become a PSI member today.[00:01:30]

Welcome to a new episode of the Effective Statistician. Today we talk about influence that you can build as a statistician in the clinical trial team, and yes, for [00:01:45] every other team. If you’re working on an observational study or in any other team, that is pretty much the same. Now, first, why actually is influence critical?

So. The [00:02:00] better you are in terms of influencing, the easier it is for you to, for example, negotiate timelines or the amount of tables that you need to deliver, or if you want to influence the study team [00:02:15] to use some kind of novel analysis methods, or you want to make sure that they have all the different estimates in the protocol, or you wanna.

Have a better adaptive designs or something like this, [00:02:30] or you wanna make better decisions within your team. All these different things ultimately lead to better outcomes for patients. So building your influence is super important. And of course [00:02:45] you need to invest time into this. I see this from the people that are within the medical data leaders community.

People that invest in that, they get better and that leads to more [00:03:00] job satisfaction for sure. One of the important things is you need to build trust and the three core pillars of trust, and I talked about this in um, may and June, 2024, so [00:03:15] you can scroll back to that a little bit. Care, character, and competence.

So people need to. Understand that you have a genuine interest for them. Yeah. To support [00:03:30] them, meet them for coffee or lunch, or create any other one-to-one time so that you can. Shows that you care for them and they get the perception that you care for them. It’s not what you [00:03:45] think, it’s what they think.

The second topic is character build. Character shows that you do what you say. Say what you do. Yeah. Be reliable. Work with [00:04:00] integrity, owning your mistakes. Communicate honestly about timelines. Don’t promise something that you can’t deliver. I. Yeah, and don’t build too much buffer into timelines. Either offer realistic [00:04:15] solutions and then deliver on them.

And if something comes up, make sure people understand that very, very early competence is of course the third component of trust. [00:04:30] You have a lot of competence just because you’re in the job. You have been selected for that. Make sure people understand that and show how you care through [00:04:45] explaining complex things in simple terms.

Yeah, and you can, of course, always work with other experts, bring these in. This doesn’t reflect bad on your competence. It is, you bring exceptional [00:05:00] competence into the team. Another topic is you need to understand where the others are coming from. What are their priorities, their goals, and also their personal needs.

Yes, everybody works [00:05:15] also for their personal needs. Is it pure reputations that people are behind or is it making sure that timelines are met or is budgets the most important thing, or is quality the most important thing? Use [00:05:30] active listening and. Open-ended questions to understand where the answers are coming from and make life for them easier.

So for example, if you work with medical writers and you see them [00:05:45] transferring data manually from your tables into some Excel spreadsheets so that they can visualize it will make their life easier and provide them a data set with all the metadata. Very, very easy for [00:06:00] you and makes the life of the medical writer so much easier or work together very closely with your regulatory scientists to understand kind of the nuances between your clinical [00:06:15] trial design and the competitions that maybe has launched or submitted before you so that you can understand, okay, what are likely regulatory questions that will come up?

Speak very, very simple [00:06:30] terms when it comes to statistics people. Outside of statistics usually are not very excited about. Statistical topics. Make it easy for them. You can also build a lot of [00:06:45] influence by thinking and acting proactively so. Instead of waiting for what kind of requests will come think about.

Okay, we will have this time abstract timeline [00:07:00] for this international conference. We’ll probably wanna submit something there. Let’s talk about what could be in, go into the abstract and what could go into the post or as a presentation As I said. Anticipate regulatory [00:07:15] queries with your regulatory persons.

Speak with your project manager to understand what kind of problems could come up from their side. What kind of. Problems or [00:07:30] questions will you get from internal committees? All of that, try to be proactive and come up with, uh, questions very, very early. That will dramatically improve your influence. [00:07:45] I’m pretty sure.

Of course, one of the really basic things is deliver high quality. If you promise good tables, then pro. Really deliver good quality tables. This is so to say, is the basic entry. If [00:08:00] you miss out on these kind of basic things, you will not be taken seriously. Yeah. And people will say, Hey, first, fix your homework and then we can talk about other things.

If you go the extra mile. Yeah, that will also improve your [00:08:15] influence. So for example, instead of just providing the standard bar charts and line parts, you work with your medical writer and your physician, and maybe also your regulatory person. How can we [00:08:30] make the data more appealing? Is there something that we can do that is a little bit more innovative to really kind of carve out what are the nuances in terms of the treatment effectiveness?

[00:08:45] Where do we have need to dive deeper into the tolerability and the safety? Just as an example. You work with your clinical operations people and see how you can better [00:09:00] predict recruitment timelines and things like this. This is all based on data. Yeah, so that is something I. Where you can help and if you perceived as helpful, that will help so much, [00:09:15] makes things easier for others.

So understand where the others are coming from. Build trust through care, character and competence. Understand and aligned team priorities. I’ve seen [00:09:30] so many teams that struggle because they’re not aligned on what is really. Success. What does success look like for this team? Do you really know? Are the others all really [00:09:45] clear on what good looks like?

Is it just timelines or is it timelines and budget, or is it quality? Very often you can’t have all three timelines, budget and quality at the same [00:10:00] time. So what is really the most important and what does good look like? Have a discussion with your team about this that will make things. Much, much easier.

Become prepared for [00:10:15] meetings is anyway a good thing. If you come prepared for the meeting, you have anticipated what kind of things will be discussed and you can provide answers, provide scenarios, all these kind of different things that will make you huge [00:10:30] difference. Yeah, just volunteer to take some minutes.

That is another way you can serve the clinical study team, and you can then drive actions and hold yourself accountable, and then you can [00:10:45] also hold others accountable. I. That will make a huge difference. I talked about influencing in so many different episodes of the Effective Statistician podcast, and of course you can listen to all these episodes, [00:11:00] but in the end, listening will not.

I. Change your influence. Doing will do it. Take action. That is the most important thing. Take small actions consistently over time and that will make a big [00:11:15] difference if you wanna further increase your influence. I recommend you go to the effective statistician.com/leadership program. You just go to the main page, so you will find our [00:11:30] medical data leaders community, the medical data leaders community.

I. It’s built for you to increase your influence. We had over 600 people already taking leadership programs from us, [00:11:45] and on an average, if we ask for how good it was on a scale from one to 10, we get a nine. In terms of. Would you recommend this program to a colleague? [00:12:00] So this is really, really good stuff. I can tell you people learn a lot and say, increase their influence.

So check out the Medical Data Leaders community. We have something for three different [00:12:15] levels, whether you are an individual contributor and you need to be successful as a study statistician, for example. Or if you are first level leader, for example, you are responsible for compound or for bigger [00:12:30] project or for specific capability area within your organization, or you have a couple of direct reports.

Yeah. Since this. First level leader, you don’t need to necessarily be a supervisor, will be [00:12:45] right for you. And then we have this senior leader. So this is more if you need to work really strategically in your organization. For example, you leader of leaders, or you’re very [00:13:00] senior in terms of the specific capability area, maybe your therapeutic area head.

Something like this. Yeah. Since the senior levels tier will be the right for you. So check out the [00:13:15] Medical Data Leaders community. There’s definitely more for you to not just listen to influencing podcasts, but actually. Implement lots of different techniques and become a more effective [00:13:30] statistician.

This show was created in association with PSI. Thanks to Reine and her team at VVS that helps the show in the background and thank you for listening. [00:13:45] Reach your potential lead great science and serve patients. Just be an effective [00:14:00] statistician.