It's time to select your New Year's Resolutions for 2016.
To get you started, how about selecting one or more of these 70 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
