Your 2026 New Year's Resolutions Check-in

Yikes. It's nearly August. Hopefully, you've mastered or are achieving good progress with your New Year's resolution(s) for 2026.

If you need another resolution to tackle this year or haven't yet selected one, now is a good time to review this list below.

New Year's Resolutions for leaders:

Don't micromanage
Don't be a bottleneck
Focus on outcomes, not minutiae
Build trust with your colleagues before a crisis comes
Assess your company's strengths and weaknesses at all times
Conduct annual risk reviews
Be courageous, quick and fair
Talk more about values more than rules
Reward how a performance is achieved and not only the performance
Constantly challenge your team to do better
Celebrate your employees' successes, not your own
Err on the side of taking action
Communicate clearly and often
Be visible
Eliminate the cause of a mistake
View every problem as an opportunity to grow
Summarize group consensus after each decision point during a meeting
Praise when compliments are earned
Be decisive
Say "thank you" and sincerely mean it
Send written thank you notes
Listen carefully and don't multi-task while listening
Teach something new to your team
Show respect for all team members
Follow through when you promise to do something
Allow prudent autonomy
Respond to questions quickly and fully
Return e-mails and phone calls promptly
Give credit where credit is due
Take an interest in your employees and their personal milestone events
Mix praise with constructive feedback for how to make improvement
Learn the names of your team members even if your team numbers in the hundreds
Foster mutual commitment
Admit your mistakes
Remove nonperformers
Give feedback in a timely manner and make it individualized and specific
Hire to complement, not to duplicate
Volunteer within your community and allow your employees to volunteer
Promote excellent customer service both internally and externally
Show trust
Encourage peer coaching
Encourage individualism and welcome input
Share third-party compliments about your employees with your employees
Be willing to change your decisions
Be a good role model
Be humble
Explain each person's relevance
End every meeting with a follow-up To Do list
Explain the process and the reason for the decisions you make
Read leadership books to learn
Set clear goals and objectives
Reward the doers
Know yourself
Use job descriptions
Encourage personal growth and promote training, mentoring and external education
Share bad news, not only good news
Start meetings on time
Discipline in private
Seek guidance when you don't have the answer
Tailor your motivation techniques
Support mentoring - both informal and formal mentoring
Don't interrupt
Ask questions to clarify
Don't delay tough conversations
Have an open-door policy
Dig deep within your organization for ideas on how to improve processes, policies and procedures
Do annual written performance appraisals
Insist on realism
Explain how a change will impact employees' feelings before, during and after the change is implemented
Have face-to-face interaction as often as possible

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