Have you started thinking about resolutions for 2023? Over 38% of adults admit to setting New Year’s resolutions each year. Unfortunately, 23% quit within the first week, and only 36% make it past the first month.
Only 9% of adults who set resolutions successfully keep them each year. These dismal numbers might make you throw out the idea of resolutions. However, even if you are unable to keep a resolution, the exercise of developing them and attempting new resolutions is incredibly beneficial.
Unfortunately, we don’t have secrets to keeping those diet and exercise goals for the New Year, we can help you consider some worthy leadership goals for 2023.
To simplify all the potential priorities for resolutions you could achieve in the New Year, we’ve pared down a list of the…
4 Most impactful goals to consider.
Even if you choose only one of these items and build action items, your leadership will improve and your team will thank you for it.
1. Listen to Your Team
As leaders, it is so easy to focus on the end goal and major objectives of your organization that we forget to focus on the people who help us meet the goals we need. Often our people are closer to the customers, the service, and the product and have insights that can help us make the best possible decisions to advance more quickly.
Having regularly scheduled feedback sessions is a good practice to keep up with the pulse of your people. Improving your ability to listen by asking great questions is the best way to make those conversations more meaningful.
Beyond the scheduled meetings, incorporate more informal listening sessions by dropping into teams, sharing a meal, or grabbing a cup of coffee. Showing interest in the activity and work of team members will improve morale.
One aspect of listening to teams is also being willing to engage in difficult conversations. Many leaders would rather avoid these interactions, but it will help strengthen accountability and build collaborative relationships with all stakeholders. You will also be able to eliminate the negative trade-offs that pit the interest of one stakeholder group against another.
2. Consider Employee Well-Being
Post-Covid, employee engagement, and well-being are constant topics. Quiet quitting and the great resignation along with record levels of burnout forced all of us to reconsider life at work. Hybrid work settings and remote workers have made this task much more difficult than in the past. If engagement and well-being were not part of your 2023 strategies, now is the time to begin implementing ways to improve well-being.
Continued research at Fierce demonstrates that people need to find purpose and value in their work. In doing so, engagement increases. A key part of increasing engagement is giving people greater autonomy with their decision-making, but also providing development opportunities to improve their skill set.
Avoiding isolation and helping people connect through a greater purpose will improve well-being across teams. Stress and burnout continue to be on the rise and helping your people develop greater resilient skills will improve their overall quality of life and workplace happiness.
Celebrate the small wins and continually look for ways to recognize people for their contribution to your team.
3. Embed agility into your culture
Because of the speed of change we all experience regardless of your industry, we must adapt and move quickly. One of the quickest ways to become adaptable in your leadership is to increase your agility.
Agility is a mindset change where responding proactively to changes by adapting quickly as change manifests. Rather than being fully committed to one path, you set action toward a goal and be willing to iterate along the way as more information arises.
It takes brave leadership to allow the freedom for teams to live in an agile world, but doing so leads to greater outcomes.
To embed agility you must instill an entrepreneurial drive in every employee. This will create a greater sense of autonomy in each contributor and not only get you to your goals faster but increase employee engagement as well.
In an agile workplace, you provide opportunities for people to showcase their unique abilities.
4. Practice self-care
While the first three resolutions were outward-focused, as a leader, self-care is critical to maintaining the ability to make clear decisions, inspire your people, and have the energy to tackle the obstacles and tasks before you.
It’s not only employees who are suffering high levels of burnout, anxiety, and depression. Leaders bear the burden of managing people and achieving organizational outcomes. Learning to manage your stressors will help you become more resilient and self-aware. Increasing resilience will help you bring greater energy and decision-making capabilities to your team.
Fierce has committed a large portion of our research and development over the last year to understanding stress and how to build resilience. Out of this research, we developed the Pulse App and Fierce Resilience to help individuals and teams to identify stressors throughout their work life and provide tools to mitigate their impact.
You can begin the process of improving self-care by analyzing those minor stressors in your life. Think through your past year, and what interactions increased internal indicators of stress. Once you identify those areas you can begin to adjust your behaviors, maximizing your strengths and improving your weaknesses. By focusing on your responses to work and becoming more self-aware, you will develop resilience and improve your leadership ability.
Resolution Wrap-Up
Whatever resolution you choose, the key to successfully implementing resolutions is to create internal motivation to achieve the resolution. You can do this by developing a strong “why” or reason as the backbone of every resolution. The “why” will keep you on track when distraction and difficulty arise.
Create meaningful and measurable action steps and find ways to turn the resolutions into regular habits. Find others within your organization to share your resolutions so you can keep each other accountable.
If you are looking for programs to install any of these resolutions, check out the many Fierce programs to further increase Resilience and Teamwork in 2023.
