The Data Fix
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was seven years old when she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. She should have been spending her days care-free, alternating between playing tag with friends and catching butterflies and fireflies. Instead, she was trying to learn how to monitor and be vigilant with her health.
The only way to monitor blood sugar levels 60 years ago was to test urine. But hours had passed between what she ate, or how she slept or exercised. She had to guess what might have impacted her levels. With such a delay in the data she could collect on her levels, it was too easy to miss a signal and respond in time. She didn’t think she would live to see middle age.
Ten years after her diagnosis, technology evolved to include monitoring through blood tests. With a small prick of the finger, she could test her blood multiple times throughout the day. That drop of blood went into a machine the size of an iPad, providing results within five minutes.
With this advance in technology, she could identify when she needed to take an insulin injection more quickly. It was easier to manage swings and blood sugar crashes. Relationships between blood sugar levels, physical activity, and something she ate were more clear. Risk was reduced and outcomes were easier to predict. But there was still a bit of a delay. Each decision she made was based on the past and still included assumptions and guessing.
Today, technology is so advanced that continuous glucose monitoring can take place through wearable devices and apps. Irregularities are identified long before the person feels it. This real-time data brings clarity to the relationship and patterns between exercise, sleep and eating and the impact on their health.
A Type 1 diabetes diagnosis today is different from sixty years ago. There is enough real-time information for someone to make tweaks and lead a healthy life. Nuances can be seen in the data and patterns are identified immediately. Guessing and assumptions go away.
Decisions are informed by multiple data points and can be made with confidence.
Organizations should monitor their own health with real-time data.
This is a place with great opportunity and current short-sightedness. Common mistakes you may be making in monitoring your organizational or team health:
The annual culture or every-other-year survey is too far removed to be meaningful. By the time leaders get results, often three or six months have passed. It’s the equivalent of testing your blood sugar levels through urine. Some organizations withhold their survey for fear they will hear negative things. This combined with failing to respond makes employees lose trust and feel it is a pointless (and expensive) exercise.
Organizations lack multiple approaches to listen, often only defaulting to the annual culture survey. Healthy organizations have at least four ways they actively listen and monitor their culture.
Executive Leadership meetings lack culture as a standing agenda item. Plenty of time is given to reviewing financial or operational updates, but culture falls off each time. It should be a dedicated item with specific expectations of each leader to share and participate.
Specific items to monitor aren’t defined. Many companies don’t know what they should be monitoring. It will differ in each company based on desired culture, values and business strategy. These are defined through a culture assessment and executive leadership workshops.
Leaders aren’t accountable for listening. I’ve coached clients to embrace the expectation that leaders spend at least one hour a week listening in their organizations. This brings a different intention and outreach that always leads to new understanding and insights from the leaders.
Real-time monitoring allows you to quickly identify patterns of what is working well to replicate it elsewhere in the organization.
They also allow you to identify problems and pain points to address them before they fester.
What are the different ways you monitor culture in your organization and on your teams?
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