The Power of the Monthly "Pulse Check"

He asked me how to talk to his boss about what he wanted next.

I almost gave him the script. Three sentences on framing, on timing, on how to make it land. I've given that speech before, and it feels good to give — it makes you sound sharp, like you've got the answer sitting in your back pocket.

I held it back instead. And asked him a question of my own.

"Do you know what your new guy wants? Not his title. His dream."

He didn't have an answer. He'd been so busy mapping his own next move that he'd never once mapped someone else's.

I know that box. I've built it myself.

I've hired people for a role and then kept them in it. It's what the team needed at the time. But it meant I never asked what they wanted next — never gave them room to dream past the title I hired them for. Looking back over my own leadership, I can name the people I boxed in without meaning to.

This is the model our organization runs, and the one I coach every leader I work with to adopt: a monthly pulse check with each person on their team. Not a review. Three numbers, one to ten:

• Life — how are things outside of work?

• Health — do you have the capacity, physically and mentally, to do this well?

• Work — are you actually energized by what's in front of you?

The number is never the point. The story behind it is.

Every pulse check ends the same way: "What's the most important thing we should talk about today?"

New team members rarely answer that honestly the first few times. They give you the safe version. That's fine. Trust isn't built in one conversation — it's built in the fourth one, and the eighth one, after they've watched you keep showing up and keep listening.

Here's what I told him: don't just ask your boss for a conversation. Give your boss a reason to start one.

Run the pulse check with your new hire. Then take what you learn to your boss — not as a request, but as a report. Tell him what you found. Tell him how you found it. Watch what that does. A boss who sees you drawing out someone else's dream might start wondering what he's never asked about yours.

That's not a guarantee. But it's a better bet than a script.

The conversation you want to have with your boss starts with the relationship you build with your team.