Leadership New Year’s Resolutions That Put You on Top of Your Industry

In a 2013 Harvard Business Review article, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett described five new year’s resolutions for influential leaders to get better at attracting, retaining, and managing the right kind of talent. In reference to previous research from the Center for Talent Innovation, she detailed five ways to become better leaders that should be adopted as new year’s resolutions: be more inclusive, create pathways for sponsorship, crack the code of executive presence, be a more active ally, and be a more proactive protégé. After more than a decade that this article was written, all five ways still stand in every leadership resolution. If we want to be even more specific we would group the last three in a single resolution that consists of having difficult conversations with employees and being a great communicator at all levels in the workplace.

Time is money and if you figure out a way to improve communication with your employees you will increase the efficiency of your practice’s operations. Efficient operations are the result of collaborative work that consists of employing both online and in-person meetings. Whatever the most convenient and most performing way the most important goal remains to Keep all operations on track require regular team meetings (in person and online), setting objectives, providing advice and guidance, and rewarding actions when deadlines and objectives are met.

You should not shy away from having difficult conversations with your team members. Remember that the team overall performance depends heavily on each individual’s performance. Therefore, your goal in having difficult conversations with your team is to find the weak link and challenge them to improve performance through constantly using constructive feedback. Engage your employees in open dialogue and conversations whenever you feel something is going well. Having difficult conversations can solve problems related to diversity, inclusion, performance, skills development, people’s issues, employees wellness, and many other problems. One of the greatest lessons from the pandemic is to prioritise psychological safety alongside physical safety in their operations by promoting safety and flexibility to create a more inclusive workplace. The more flexible and safe is the workplace the better are the outcomes, employee well-being, job satisfaction, productivity, and efficient operations.

Difficult conversations can facilitate everyone speaking up to bring new opinions, ideas, and identify conflicting viewpoints. There is nothing wrong with failure, however, good leaders know how to learn and benefit from the way failure is handled to initiate change and improve upon it. Some of the key elements that make difficult to have conversations successful include focusing on logic and facts, not becoming emotional and feeling-driven, honesty, collaborating on finding solutions, and setting the tone and the objectives of the conversation in advance.