When you know strong data visualization is crucial to your team’s success but you have a boss stuck in Windows 95, you need to manage up. You need sneaky ways to launch a data viz revolution at work.

Drop my book in the break room.

When Presentation Zen came out in 2008, I breezed through it in an hour, changed everything I thought about how to give a good presentation, and then left it in the break room at my last salaried job. Maybe a day later, my boss brought it to me.

Her: “Have you seen this?”

Me: “Yeah I looked at it while eating lunch the other day.”

Her: “Yeah, I just browsed it while I was waiting for the coffee to brew. This is good. We need to be doing this. Can you look into this more?”

That, my friend, is how you bait a trap and catch a new job responsibility that lets you do way more design.

If you want to focus strictly on data visualization, put my orange book in the break room. If you want to expand to page design, slideshows, dashboards, and one pagers, get my blue book.

You want full color illustrations. Easily breezeable.

Send your chart to me for public review.

A few times a year I give free feedback on people’s charts. I’ll post this opportunity on my social media, so you’ll want to follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram.

Innocently drop one of your own recent graphs from work into the comments. I will reply with strengths and considerations for improvement that are easily and immediately implementable. MAKE THOSE CHANGES.

Then take my feedback and your before and after graphs to the rest of your team like “OMG look at what this expert said about my graph! Here’s what it looks like now.”

These two strategies rely on outside experts to point out that y’all need to upgrade. These raise awareness of the issue.

Take the leap with one client.

Pick your edgiest, youngest-at-heart client and makeover a few graphs from your last reporting. Show them the old and new versions and collect their comments.

They’ll love it, obviously, and nothing convinces your boss to pay attention more than client accolades.

It’s possible that you’ll get into a tiny bit of hot water for communicating with the client like that but the client’s happiness will buffer you from any real blowback.

You can also make this a baby step if your clients aren’t ready for a total revolution. For example, you could just update the colors in your charts. Leave the pie with too many slices and just add a clear, storytelling title. You don’t have to overhaul the look of everything.

Build the momentum and make it fun.

My clients run makeover contests and hold data parties.

Think “12 Days of Data” before the holiday break.

I want you cutting out blue ribbons to award to the best before-and-after.

I compiled a bunch of their data viz culture-building strategies over here.

Standardize your methods.

When energy is high, you’d think this is a good thing but it will also mean Martha and Rodney start intra-office debates about which shade of green to put on that dumbbell dot plot.

You need to corral the excitement with a style guide that dictates what your charts will look like. Develop some graph templates so everyone’s products look the same AND you save the team a billion hours of their time.

Claim your leadership.

When your clients are beaming and your boss is happy, don’t forget to take credit. You changed a whole culture and you deserve the flowers.