Week 1 (Part 1): YouMap® Project Management

In my two previous blogs, I went over how I sold participants on YouMap® as well as the breakdown of my coaching strategy. Part 1 of this blog will go over the additional prep work that went into the first coaching, then I’ll cover how the coaching session actually went down in part 2

The days leading up to the group session on Saturday, May 8th…

I started out this week by building out a project management system to keep track of all of the moving pieces of the project:

Project support onboarding
Participant onboarding
Survey Creation and Delivery
Slide Deck Creation

I also choose Trello because of its visual, dashboard-like feel that allows me to see the bigger picture of my project. Below is a video on how I use Trello to break down my project.

Project Support Onboarding:

Given the scope of this project and knowing where to best focus my time and energy — I onboarded Liliana Cortes, an undergraduate student at Belmont University, to lend me a hand on the documentation front. I did so with the intention of mentoring someone by sharing my knowledge while also providing her with an opportunity to grow professionally. Here is a video breakdown of how I use my knowledge YouMap® and talent acquisition to recruit Liliana, and how my strategy essentially allows me to also create effective partnerships within People Operations:

Participant onboarding

Once I had Liliana onboarded for project support, I proceeded to track down the progress of all 6 participants via my YouMap® coach portal, and I created a group chat on WhatsApp to streamline all the communication. With the group being small, scheduling sessions came fairly easy. I knew that only two participants had current job commitments, so I set a date for Saturday, May 8th, and all I had to do was check in with only those two. Once they said yes, I sent out calendar invites and YouMap® reports to each participant individually. Below is the email template I sent out:

Survey Creation and Delivery…

I got the idea of creating an entry survey to gauge what participants wanted most out of the coaching project so that I could a) focus my approach b) provide the most value and c) measure my success.

The central survey question that I asked participants was: “What do you hope to get out of this YouMap® self-discovery process?”

I thought this question worked for several reasons:

It used conversational language like “…get out of this”
It uses emotional appeal terms like “hope”
And it was open-ended enough for participants to speculate on their answers.

While open-ended questions like the one above worked well for the survey, asking leading, “yes” or “no,” questions also come in handy, when properly. For example, I asked: “have you taken any self-assessment tests in the past?”

The obvious answers would be “yes” or “no” which doesn’t leave much room for nuance. For good measure, I wrote a follow-up, more open-ended question with a scale option of 1 (least satisfied) to 10 (most satisfied): “If you have taken any personality and self-awareness assessments in the past, how satisfied were you with the results?”

This question format also worked well because it offered participants a measuring scale + a way to reference their past experience.

Here is a link to the final entry survey form that I sent out to participants:

Preparing the presentation slide deck

One of the perks of being YouMap® Certified is the slide deck templates that come with the training. All I had to do was customize the slides to meet the context of Praxis and what participants wanted to get out of YouMap®. Then, I created the following objectives based on the survey responses:

Uncover the four pillars of career satisfaction
Identify best-fit careers and roles during placement
Research and target opportunities with confidence
Create your personal brand as you go through Praxis

I also made sure to review the slide deck to a) add visuals of the session’s activities, b) highlight in red the strengths represented within the group + put an asterisk next to ones that I also had in common with the participants, and c) include a clear call to action items. Here is a preview of some of my slide deck: