Building Better LeadersThe gravitational pull of New Year’s lists is almost too powerful to overlook.  You can hardly take a stroll through the blogosphere right now without tripping over these lofty, noble goals intended to guide behavior and ensure that we end up new people by the end of next year.

New Year’s resolutions ebb and flow much like health club attendance, spiking in January and returning to normalcy sometime in February, when those that are dedicated to daily fitness are thankful for a bit more breathing and sweating room.

I expressed my opinion on the ineffectiveness of making annual resolutions in January in a recent Leadership Caffeine post entitled, “An Effective Leader’s Resolutions are Calendar Blind.”

Translation: good leaders work on improving their blocking and tackling every single dayMy suggestion is for you to create a “Leader’s Reminder List” and reference it every morning over breakfast, or keep it in your car and briefcase and review it before you walk through the door into the office.

Nine Starter Suggestions for Your Daily Leader’s Reminder List:

  • Remind yourself that it is your goal today to improve your performance as a leader.
  • Walk in the door with a smile on your face and take the long way around to your office and personally greet the early risers.
  • Control your own calendar and manage the time allocation to ensure a preponderance of time for observation, coaching and delivering feedback. Calendar misuse and abuse is a huge contributor to leadership ineffectiveness.  Don’t let yourself be victimized by the tyranny of others scheduling your time into useless oblivion.
  • Speaking of calendars, what can you do to simplify and minimize the administrative time demand that you are placing on the people that work for you? Help your team members find some calendar time—and teach them to use this time properly and watch productivity soar.
  • Spend more time listening and asking questions every single day. Translation: talk less. Your artful use of questioning and your reduction in hot air time will also free up time for everyone involved and improve the performance environment on your team.
  • Spend more time engaging with your boss and your peers. Again, emphasize questions that help to uncover performance issues, opportunities for goals alignment and opportunities for innovation.  Be certain to share your insights from these conversations with your team members.
  • Find ways to encourage constructive debate on the tough issues.  Improve the quality and openness of your team’s culture, and you will improve performance.
  • Teach the art of decision-making to your team. Of course, this assumes that you have a good decision-making process of your own and that you avoid snap decisions that end up being countermanded or that you actually make timely decisions instead of holding your team hostage.  Work to foster the processes that facilitate team and individual decision-making.
  • Respond to adversity with grace and turn the most difficult and disappointing of outcomes into opportunities to teach and improve.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

While you may very well have some long-range performance improvement goals, I encourage you to exercise your leadership muscle on a daily basis and improve one work-day and one workout at a time.  Do this, and you will be a very different leader sooner instead of later.