Taking the pulse
We’re growing. Quickly.
Since April, our Transferable Skills team has nearly doubled in size. We’re still small, but standing up a new team isn’t as simple as expanding a team with deep roots and history. Institutional knowledge looks different when most people haven’t been with the organization longer than a few weeks, and those who have are tackling new roles, new direction.
As we growing, we’re able to do more. The number of things we’ve started is multiplying daily as new hands and minds come available. It’s exciting to see things that were once ideas begin to take shape. But with this momentum comes a growing need to structure our work in a way that suits the team we’re becoming.
We’re pivoting, and by fall, we’ll be a new team entirely.
We are all navigating this change (my job is to help). As we grow, we are conscious of not losing sight of what matters most. And high on that list is how the team is feeling, week by week, month by month.
I’ve talked about this before — about how our real focus is on growing a mindset that is open to learning, and that puts a premium on empathy and vulnerability — our emotional IQ, if you will. But we are figuring out that those things are easier said than done. And too often, it isn’t.
That’s why one of the things we’ve implement is a weekly poll that allows us to contribute to the emotional profile of the team. It allows us to map our journey together.
It’s very simple. Once a week, all of us on the team receive a text message that asks us to rate how our week is going, on a scale from 1–7, and then invites them to submit words that describe how we feel. The poll goes out on Tuesday, and a summary of the results is sent by Friday. Nobody is forced to participate, and everybody gets the results at the same time. Including me.
We collect the data in a way that respects everyone’s privacy, and nothing submitted gets disaggregated. But in the years I’ve been doing this, one trend I feel confident sharing is that words like anxious, and uncertain appear in equal measure to excited and motivated. And that to a fault, all of us are feeling the same things, no matter where we sit in some org chart.
One of my colleagues, Kym Shumsky, is new to this pulse survey stuff. She calls the polls an embodiment of transferable skills — not because of what they reveal about us, but because of how they put mindset before process. She says that the intangible parts are the most important in that she has a chance, every week, to gauge her own well-being (I hadn’t thought of things this way, so this makes me super happy). And an equal chance to hear directly from her colleagues about how they feel, too. She happens to be a fairly visual person, so I can see the wheels spinning whenever she talks about plotting the data. (I hope she does!)
But the most important thing is that this information doesn’t sit on a shelf. These poll results are a standing item on our team meetings, and where there are words that make us uncomfortable, we take them on, and make them less scary. We talk about fear. We talk about frustration. It matters.
Best of all, these polls aren’t bound by the size of the team — only the desire of its members to stay connected, empathetic and engaged. That’s the real pulse of Transferable Skills. We’re growing, minds and hearts alike.
Does your team make time for emotional well-being? Would you be interested in workshops about SMS polling if we offered them? We’d love to hear from you!
If you’re curious about Transferable Skills, check out my first blog posts to learn a little more about what we’re all about, and how we’re learning to walk the walk.
