If you are looking to improve next year, a New Year’s resolution will keep you focused and make sure you make progress. Here are some tried and true resolutions that have helped me build my career. The recommended resolutions follow, and the reasoning follows after them.
Two tips to make setting resolutions painless:
- Choose only one and focus on the first quarter. Any more or any longer and you will find too many excuses to do them.
- Use this format to make it simple:
I will [action] every [timeframe] so that I can [result].
The List
- 👥 I will have one-on-one meetings with each of my direct reports at least every other week so that I can better understand their needs.
- 🧠�I will spend 30 minutes each week learning (fill-in-the-blank, learning what? AI? Something specific in your industry? A new tool?), by reading an industry article, taking an online (or in-person) course, or watching a video so that I can better understand my industry and improve my management performance.
- 🧮 I will learn basic Excel functions, including filters, pivot tables, and VLOOKUP formulas so that I can use data in my decision-making more effectively.
- ☎ I will make at least one networking contact outside my company every week so that I can understand what’s happening in my industry and future-proof my career.
- 🗓 I will create a monthly report of my team’s performance, including KPIs/metrics, accomplishments from last month, and key upcoming activities/deadlines so that I can increase alignment of our activities and find more reasons to celebrate and reward them.
The Reasoning
- 👥 One-on-one meetings. I know a lot of people struggle with this one. Yes, I know you work closely with every one of your people. One-on-ones aren’t about work or project status though. A dedicated time set aside at least once a week gives your employees a chance to ask questions that don’t come up every day. It shows them that you care about them more than the work they do for you. If you aren’t doing these yet, try it with your very best employee for three weeks. They are often the ones who don’t get your time because they are so self-sufficient. Explain that you want to hear from them, what can the team do differently, what can you do differently. Use the time as discovery time, not directing time. After the first three, ask your employee if they find them valuable. If it works, expand to the rest of the team. If it doesn’t work for you, you’ve only lost three hours.
- 🧠 Learning. Without a specific goal, learning often stops. Your job is changing though. If you don’t learn, you fall behind. If you can’t think of anything, choose to learn AI. Spend 30 minutes a week talking with ChatGPT or Bard and see how it could be useful. Read how AI is changing how things get done.
- 🧮 Excel (or Sheets). My ability to whip up a Pivot Table out of any random data set has allowed me to make better decisions, ask better questions, understand my customers more quickly, and measure results more easily. When you are comfortable with data, you are instantly more credible and effective. Managers need to understand the data that their team uses, and the data that their team generates. Otherwise, you can’t improve your team’s results, which is job #1.
- ☎ Networking. The busier you are, the easier it is to stay inside your company. A well-placed phone call gives you perspective though, and helps you stay in touch. By knowing what’s happening outside your company, you become more effective at your current role, and more likely to land the next role, in or out of the company.
- 🗓 Monthly reports. I resisted the idea of monthly reports for way too long. Once I got into the habit though, I found some very impactful side effects.
— 👀 First, it aligns your team. If they see, on a regular basis, what achievements are important enough to catch your attention, they start doing more of those. The ones you don’t call out tend to slide away quietly. Suddenly, that report that takes hours to generate and adds no value, but you couldn’t just kill it because “we’ve always done it”, that report starts to be questioned. Your team will start to understand how their activities drive the accomplishments you care about. I had several say “you never mention this, is it not important to you?”. What a great conversation to say, “great question, let’s look at it together and see why it isn’t hitting the top list”.
— 📣 Second, it provides more opportunities to promote your team throughout the company. I often took information from my manager’s reports and used them in my own reports, or in company meetings. The visibility for your team is incredible, and with higher visibility comes higher morale. People want to know that what they do impacts the company and the customers. This gives you a visible way to make that true.
Need some accountability for your resolutions? It might be time to find a coach. If you’d like to learn more about that option, please let me know.
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