The Simple Technique that Helps You Manage Your Team, Your Money, and Yourself

One of the benefits of working at home with my husband is I get to watch and learn his management style. Like a lot of two-income couples, we juggled work and four young kids (three learning remotely) 2020–2022. One thing we both struggled with in moving to an all-remote work (and learning) environment, was getting a sense for the “emotional temperature” of the people with whom we were interacting.

The 1–5 Emotional Check-In

My husband learned a simple technique to gauge how others were doing as part of a group exercise from a class he participated in over the summer, and I’ve subsequently adopted it in a lot of settings. Here’s how it works.

The lead/moderator asks:

“On a scale of 1–5, where 5 equals walking down the red carpet, and 1 equals pulling the covers over your head, how are you doing right now?”

Everyone then puts their number in the chat.

The key is no one has to explain or talk about their number. The point of gauging people’s emotional energy level is to understand where everyone is coming from in order to better manage discussion and interaction. This emotional check-in strategy has become an invaluable part of my remote and in-person day, and I’ve started using it in three key areas.

Managing Your Team

I’m pretty analytical, and I work with a lot of data and system-oriented people. Emotions aren’t a hot topic. The benefit of the number scale is it affords an opportunity to everyone to see how they’re doing, personally, as well get a simple grasp of where others are with a project or day without delving into personal information. One time, I started a meeting where two people rated themselves a 1–2, and two others rated themselves a 5. It was obvious that grinding through an hour-long strategy review wasn’t going to be effective. We took 30 minutes to figure out key areas, and then reconvened a day later.

Managing Your Money

In the past year, I launched several self-paced personal finance programs for women leaders. Most of the women I work with are high earners and high achievers. Their interest in finance is about creating a more intuitive values-based approach to money and life. One of the questions we ask going into any financial decision is “On a scale of 1–5, how do you feel about _______?” If a spend area, new job opportunity, or revenue stream isn’t at least at a 4, we evaluate if it’s something to improve or let go of. Sometimes, the question shifts to why we rate something high or low, but it almost invariably leads to more clarity and action-oriented financial decisions.

Managing Yourself

At the end of the day, the only person we have control over is ourselves. I began the Women Empower Women leadership community with Jessika Portney to support women in their leadership journeys. What comes up time and again, is that leadership is often lonely. It can be particularly lonely for women who are only recently seeing themselves in upper management and beyond. Everyone who shows up tends to be involved in tough stuff — from public policy and new work roles, to starting not-for-profits and being out of work. We discussed using the “emotional check-in” with ourselves not just in work settings, but also any time we need to show up: talking with our kids; parent-teacher conferences; networking events; church or faith settings; or even before starting a routine activity like exercise.

I encourage you to use the “emotional check-in” today. I’m interested to hear:

How has this technique been helpful for you?

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Ariel Scheirer is a leader in strategy for organizations and personal finance for women, focusing on how values drive financial decisions. As Principal of The Scheirer Group, she leads multi-disciplinary teams to connect ideas and people for meaningful change.