Top 10 Leadership Resolutions for the New Year

By Francie Dalton on December 14th, 2010
Top 10 Leadership Resolutions for the New Year

In the 24/7 competitive marketplace, for the New Year now more than ever leaders must go from good to best to stay ahead.

Want your organization – your department – your group – to be the very best it can be? Start by identifying the criteria that constitute “best” and then consider whether your leadership provides observable evidence of those criteria. Here are leadership resolutions for empowering leadership in your company for the New Year.

1. Leaders must be agile – Speed of responsiveness is a competitive distinction. It requires moment-by-moment deductive reasoning, real-time monitoring of events and trends, and the ability to anticipate what’s coming next before others even recognize the indicators. Organizational agility, however, is not synonymous with agile leadership. Are you subordinating effectiveness to existing structure? Insisting on certainty before taking any risk? Impeding change because you’re comfortable with current state? Resolve today to make fear your friend. Fear spawns innovation, reveals options, imposes efficacies, and functions to help you achieve desired state.

2. Embrace Unity: Leaders must make employees essential contributors to shared goals. Unity isn’t cognitive. Even if borne of shared belief, unity is an emotional state, and is palpable. It is built not through dogma or a series of completed transactions, but through a quality of leadership that resonates with those being led. Are you striving for mere compliance from your employees? Instead, resolve to lead in a way elicits their voluntary, unified commitment.

3. Provide Accountability: Establishing and meeting targeted business outcomes nourishes self esteem, enhances careers, and builds leadership capabilities. Are you dwarfing fledgling leaders by absolving them of accountability? Are you depriving them of a sense of achievement by intervening on their developmental flailing? Resolve to develop confident, competent leaders by not providing answers or solutions. Instead, format constructive, critical feedback into Socratic questions so they have to deduce the lesson.

4. Build Community: Does your organization have an online, annotated human capital directory that is searchable by name, function, capabilities (whether part of current function or not), hobbies, affiliations, etc.? Have you tasked your existing staff with developing killer on-boarding programs? Do you and your managers conduct stay interviews? Assuming you have an intranet, are you regularly featuring employee accomplishments? Is there an employee “bulletin board”? If not, you have an employee base - not a community.

5. Increase Levity: Humor is the weapon of the powerful relationships. Are you alert to and actively seeking “the lighter side”? Nothing shows more confidence under dire circumstances than a moment of wit or an amusing perspective – so long as it’s not at anyone’s expense. Recognize the rallying effect of humor, and use it as the powerful leadership tool it is. Resolve to laugh at yourself at least once daily – or better yet – share a laugh about yourself with a different staff member every day.

6. Be Approachable – An open-door policy, a suggestion box, an invitation delivered at an all-staff meeting to “come visit” – even a memo promising folksy charm isn’t the kind of approachability employees want from their leaders. Get out there! Don’t sit back passively waiting for them to initiate contact; YOU have to do the approaching. Institute periodic breakfasts or lunches with hierarchically segmented groups, offering open and/or issue specific agendas. Task each of your direct reports with keeping you informed about the challenges and achievements their employees. When you later engage with those individuals, surprise and delight them with your awareness of specific details. Resolve today to step out of your office and into the working lives of your employees.


7. Expand Responsibility: Take action to help the unfortunate, contribute to society, protect the earth, and more. Your role as leader not only requires you to model this behavior consistently, but also to foster it in others. Resolve to be conspicuous in exhibiting a sense of responsibility for the earth and its inhabitants. Better still: create opportunities for your employees to do likewise.

8. Create Possibility: Leaders can be so absorbed in moving people and organizations from current state to desired state that they fail to inquire about “possible state”. When was the last time you set aside time to just “wonder” together with your employees? “What could we do if…what should we do with…what next big step…what new idea…” Resolve to engage your employees in possibility thinking.

9. Think Versatility: Typically leaders create, apply and direct multiple types of capital simultaneously: financial, intellectual, natural, human, etc. There is another type of capital leaders also use every day, but perhaps with less fluency: social capital. More than just an indication of how well networked you are, this important component of your leadership portfolio reveals the ability to modify your style of leadership to be just as effective with your CTO, for example, as you are with your CMO. Successful leaders get good at packaging their messages to elicit what they need from engineering, sales, manufacturing, finance, etc. Resolve today to stop waiting for others to become who you wish they were, and instead, develop the versatility to work effectively with who they actually are!

10. Demand Creativity: Absent your explicit invitation for creative ideas to reduce workloads, you may never hear such ideas as reformatting deliverables, strategic abandonment, joint-venturing, portfolio workers, job sharing, virtual employment, etc. Resolve today to invite creative ideas from your employees on how to honor work/life balance.

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Blog: Track all the latest on leadership at Francie’s blog – http://franciedalton.wordpress.com/,
Twitter: @FrancieDalton.
Website: Dalton Alliances for more innovative leadership insight – http://www.daltonalliances.com.


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