Actually, the data reveals that checking in with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless. While team leaders who check in once a week see, on average, a 13 percent increase in team engagement, those who check in only once a month see a 5 percent decrease in engagement.

Each check-in, then, is a chance to offer a tip, or an idea that can help the team member overcome a real-world obstacle, or a suggestion for how to refine a particular skill. Check-ins can be short—ten to fifteen minutes —but that’s plenty of time to do a little real-time learning and coaching. And, like all good coaching, this has to be rooted in the specifics of the particular situation the team member is facing, the psychology she is bringing to it, the strengths she possesses, and the strategies she might already have tried. Again, the only way to surface these sorts of microdetails is to make sure that the conversations are frequent.

This suggests that team members who check in with their leader frequently have an enhanced sense of being able to use their strengths every day, of being recognized for excellent work, and of having opportunities to grow. Although this study did not distinguish between correlation and causation (we could not tell whether the increased frequency of conversation led to increased engagement or vice versa), subsequent research, a portion of which is described in the final section of this appendix, indicated that it was in fact the increased attention, via frequent conversation, that led to the increased levels of engagement.

A check-in is a fifteen-minute conversation that you have with your team leader each week about your upcoming week. This conversation is built on your answers to four short questions, two about last week, two about this week:

What activities did I love last week?

What activities did I loathe last week?

What are my priorities this week?

What help do I need from you, my team leader?

If you are a team leader, you too must be a bringer of trust into your team. Do your check-ins each week; make few and small commitments and keep them all; never talk negatively about one team member to another; always do for people what is right for them even if that is not always what they want; share in detail with each one what you have come to see and learn about them. These are the sorts of actions that, little by little, build trust on your team and bring love in.