Your Reporting Guy is not a Unicorn Handler
Nor is he a young Harry Potter.
You should know better…but maybe you don’t. Depending on the very fact that you call someone your “reporting guy” might signify you are wasting your resources.
It’s one thing to have a reporting analyst or several analysts to help you dive deeper into the numbers.
But if your analyst is spending a lot of time gathering data, putting it in a system and then massaging it for “executive consumption”; you are lost. There’s also a good chance that the data you are receiving contains errors.
If there are errors, it doesn’t mean your reporting guy is incompetent or that the unicorns are acting unruly. It means that he’s human and it’s too much to manually create.
There’s nothing worse than being the reporting guy, and realizing in mid-meeting that you made a mistake. I’ve been there…and it ranks right up there with being kicked by a unicorn in the cajones’ in terms of sinking feelings.
The truth is you might not even know the “how” of what occurs in the Reportland.
You should find out.
Your young wizard might be nervous at first from all the attention, but once he realizes that this is a chance for him to unload the repetitive portion of his job in return for more time finding “truth” among the analytics, you’ll likely be rewarded in terms of increased enthusiasm and even better analysis than previously experienced.