131. Do we need to rethink leadership resolutions for the New Year?

Transcript – Episode 131: Do we need to rethink leadership resolutions for the New Year?

Joe: If you want to become a better leader in the new year, don’t set any resolutions. [Music]

Joe: Welcome to the Boss Better Now podcast sponsored by Boss Hero School, where we teach leaders and business owners how to activate employee commitment in today’s everchanging workplace. All right, we’ve reached that time in the calendar where we naturally reflect on the year that was and begin planning for the year ahead. And maybe you are starting to think about how you might want to show up differently as a leader in the year ahead to be more effective to get better results or maybe just to enjoy a better quality of life. Where do we start? What are the things that we should focus on to improve our leadership practice in the year ahead? Well, a couple of years ago, Gallup published a book called It’s the Manager, which was packed with findings around what it takes to improve and increase employee engagement in the workplace. And Gallup’s been studying this for years. Their data set and their historical patterns of research are sort of the granddaddy of them all in this space. And among the many findings that were published in this book, there are two that stand out to me. When Gallup looked at the teams that had the highest levels of engagement and then looked at the habits or patterns that were present among the leaders of those teams, they saw two specific behaviors showing up again and again. Number one, the leaders of those teams maintained an ongoing commitment to their own professional development. And number two, the leaders of those teams were part of a peer group that would gather together regularly to talk about leadership. Now, these two findings can form the basis for a foundation of leadership practice that you could embrace in the year ahead that would most certainly help you improve as a leader in a multitude of ways. But if we’re going to use these to set resolutions for the year ahead, we should talk a little bit about how resolutions work, which is they don’t. There’s actually a lot of science around this. The normal practice that we have embraced for years of setting New Year’s resolutions really doesn’t work very well at all. Think about the things that you maybe have tried to tackle as a New Year’s resolution in the past. I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to get better with money. I’m going to exercise more often. I am going to uh change my career path. We set these big audacious transformational ideas as our New Year’s resolutions and then we lose enthusiasm for them pretty quickly. There’s a lot of reasons that that happens. One of which, of course, is that the ideas are too big for us to actually pursue and execute quickly. We get discouraged, our willpower decreases, and we give up. There’s actually some timeline around this. The second Friday of every January is now actually called Quitter’s Day because that’s when we see the biggest drop from people sustaining the resolutions they started the year out committed to. Think about that. The practice of setting New Year’s resolutions consistently only works for about 2 weeks. That’s terrible. So, what should we do instead? What’s the secret to driving transformation in our lives at the start of a new year? It’s not in setting resolutions. It’s identifying a specific habit that you then turn into an identity. Let me talk about what this looks like. If you decide you want to uh have a healthier diet in 2026, that could encompass a lot of things. And if you set that as your resolution, you’re probably going to fail pretty quickly for all the reasons we just talked about. But what’s the micro habit underneath this umbrella concept of I’m going to eat healthy? Let’s break it down to its smallest, most manageable, most adoptable practice. Maybe instead of saying I’m going to eat healthy in 2026, you say, “I’m going to stop drinking soda or I’m going to cut back on sugary drinks.” That’s a very specific habit that you can embrace and it’s far less daunting than everything that comes with I’m going to eat healthy. Or maybe you’re you want to say, “I’m going to exercise more.” Well, exercise more again is a big thing to bite off. A better practice to embrace might be to say, “I’m going to run one mile twice a week.” Now, those are the granular habits that you identify. Then you need to turn them into an identity. So, if you decide that you want to cut back on sugary drinks, you want to figure out a way to make that an I am statement. I am someone who rarely drinks soda. That might be one of them. You might say, I drink mostly water. And actually, that I drink mostly water is an even more powerful frame because it’s framed around something that you do, not something that you avoid. If you make your identity, I don’t drink soda, what you set up is an identity of resistance. that every day I’m going to wake up and I’m going to resist doing this versus an I do identity which says I mostly drink water that sets you up with a frame of a practice that you can embrace that is healthy that will recur again and again and again it’s the same thing with exercise you can say I run twice a week and that is a specific I do identity but you can go even bigger than that you can embrace the identity of I’m a runner and when you start to think about what comes with that kind of an identity, it can be a really powerful force to start helping you push forward to the transformation you desire. Now, let’s put this in a leadership context. Let’s say that you decide that as a leader in the year ahead, you want to try to be calmer and manage your emotions more effectively. Well, that’s a pretty big task to undertake or one of those big resolutions that you probably need to break down into something smaller. So, what does that look like? What’s the habit? What’s the micro behavior that you want to get specific about? Maybe what you decide is if somebody says or does something that makes me angry, I’m going to wait and not show a reaction. That’s a very specific granular behavior that you can start to try and cultivate. And then you can turn that into an identity. You can say, I am someone who chooses to respond instead of react. These are the kinds of practices that can help you improve your leadership in the year ahead. If you don’t set resolutions, you instead look for a habit that you can turn into an identity. And now that you know this, how are we going to use it in our leadership practice to get better? Well, let’s return to those two findings that I just described a few minutes ago. The first one is that the teams with the highest level of engagement have leaders who commit to ongoing professional development in their lives. One of my favorite micro habits that I encourage leaders to think about is something that I call the Monday 20. It’s taking 20 minutes every Monday to do something that contributes to your professional development as a leader. Maybe it’s 20 minutes of reading a book. Maybe it’s 20 minutes of listening to a podcast. Hey, I know a really good one that you might like if you need some suggestions. Maybe it’s taking 20 minutes one week to plan your attendance at a conference or signing up for a particular kind of training event. When you have this weekly practice, this weekly habit that becomes a system, you can use it to set up an identity. That identity is I work on professional development every week. And if the Monday 20 doesn’t work for you, if it needs to be the Friday 30, that’s fine. Whatever the whatever day of the week and whatever the amount of time that’s right for you is, the idea here is to adopt the practice, the micro habit, so that you can turn it into an identity. That second finding that we talked about that the teams with the highest level of engagement have leaders who are a part of a peer group that engage in ongoing conversations about leadership. Well, that’s something you can turn into a micro practice as well. Start thinking ahead to the year ahead. Can you assemble a group of leaders and create a routine where you periodically get together with them to talk about the challenges you’re facing, the wind you have, the patterns that you’re seeing in the workplace or around how people show up. And can you use that group to process those things together, to support each other, to troubleshoot things together? There’s a term for this in the business space. It’s often referred to as masterminding. It’s the idea that when you put a group of people together, they all bring their own experience and perspective together into the room. And that that sort of forms this mastermind that sits above the group that everybody gets to draw from. And having that habit and that routine can be a powerful way to uplevel your leadership practice in the new year. And you know what? If you can’t pull together a group, maybe you work in a small business or you don’t have a lot of peers at your level, then maybe the practice for you is to start thinking about where you can seek out mentors. Mentorship can be a powerful tool that does this same kind of thing that that peer group habit does. Now, a mentor is ideally somebody that does not supervise you. They don’t have responsibility for overseeing your work, but they are someone who has experience maybe that you don’t have, or maybe it’s someone who has a style or approach that you admire, and you want to learn from. Once you identify some folks that you might want to use as mentors, the best way to approach them isn’t necessarily to go and say, “Will you be my mentor?” And don’t get me wrong, that can work, but that might be a big commitment to someone who doesn’t really understand what they’re getting into. And because everybody is so busy these days, you might have a greater likelihood of hearing a I’m sorry, I don’t have capacity for that right now. Instead, my advice would be reach out to the person that you would like to have mentor you and say, “I have one or two questions about blank.” And this should be about a specific topic or habit or problem. “I have one or two questions about blank. Would you be open to a 15minute call where I could ask you a little bit about this?” That is a much easier yes to get to when you are approaching a busy person like this. Please do not approach someone that you want to be your mentor and ask to pick their brain. They probably get asked this three times a week, especially if they’re an accomplished person. And they don’t have time for that. They don’t have time to set up lunches or coffees to have their brains picked constantly. But if you say, “I have one or two questions about blank. Would it be okay if I asked you for 15 minutes for a call to ask you about this? You’re much more likely to get a yes. Then when you have that conversation, if it goes well, you could consider saying something like this. This has been really helpful. And one of the things that I’m trying to do in my leadership practice is be more intentional about mentorship. Would it be okay if I reached out to you every couple of months to ask you for advice or perspective? Now, see what I did there? I framed it very specifically around the commitment that I’m asking them to make. And that commitment is about timing and frequency. Would it be okay if I reached out to you every couple of months to ask you for advice or input around these kinds of things? And if they say yes, great. You have actually set up a mentoring relationship. If they say no, great. At least you know you’re not chasing something that is not available to you. And if you can set up two or three or four relationships like this, then you’ve actually created a kind of board of advisers for your leadership practice that you can tap into all year long. I’ve got one more bonus tip for you this week as you think about the year ahead. If you’re like many of the leaders that I encounter when I keynote at conferences or when we bring workshops into organizations for leaders or as part of our Boss Hero School curriculum, you might be feeling exhausted. Maybe you’re feeling burned out. Maybe you’re feeling like you can never get away because things fall apart when you’re not around or there’s nobody to back you up. Maybe it feels like you’re just barely keeping your head above water and there’s just no way that you can step away from time to time for fear of falling behind. The truth is if you are in this state of mind, this is not sustainable for you in the new year. This is going to continue to take more of a toll on you and you are going to be less effective in your role as a leader. If you’re feeling burned out, exhausted, or overwhelmed, really the only solution, the only path forward for you is to figure out a way to do less work and get more time away. And I know that probably sounds daunting, but I want to encourage you to think about some ways where you can start to give away operational knowledge and responsibility in some places in your work. If you are the backs stop, if you are the go-to person, if you have to be there to direct and guide and answer questions and when things blow up, you’re the first phone call and oh my goodness, what do we do? That’s the problem we need to solve for. We need to create other experts around us who can do some of those same things. And maybe that requires you to do some succession planning. Maybe it requires you to do some cross training. Maybe it requires you to promote one or two people around you to take on some more of this. If you are able to do that, your quality of life is going to improve. The quality of the employee experience is going to improve because there’s going to be less cha chaos and overwhelm for people. And most importantly, you are going to free up your time and capacity to be able to do the things that only you can do. The things that really, really matter from leadership. This is where you’re going around and you’re coaching others. You’re going around and you’re creating the conditions at work for people to thrive through the interactions that you have, the programs that you drive, and the mentorship that you are giving to others. Too often we do see leaders at times who create a dependency in their workplaces where in order to feel like I’m earning my pay or to be invaluable to my bosses, it needs to be clear that this place can’t run without me. If you actually work to set it up so that the place can run without you, you will be more effective, you will be happier, and you will actually increase your value to that organization. So, there you have it, friends. Don’t set New Year’s resolutions. Identify habits that you can turn into identities to elevate your leadership practice in the year ahead. What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Pop a comment in the box below this video here on YouTube or if you’re listening, shoot me an email at boss bettergmail.com. Thanks for being here. See you next time.

Joe: If you like these episodes, then make sure you subscribe to my BossBetter Email Newsletter. Once a month, I’m going to send you an email packed full of insight, advice, articles, and more on activating employee commitment in today’s everchanging workplace. This is also where you’ll find out about opportunities for programming for Boss Hero School and more. Just go to bossetnow.com to subscribe. [Music]