Make Your Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions Count
Every year we hear a lot about resolutions; “New year, new me,” “New year, better me,” and other similar phrases. But how popular is setting goals and resolutions? New Year’s resolution statistics show that younger people tend to set new goals, whereas older individuals aren’t as big fans. When you are a manager, you not only have to think about marketing to B2B but also about maintaining your workforce’s confidence and productivity at high levels. You can set the top 10 most popular New Year’s resolutions, but you won’t go anywhere with them unless you are realistic. People tend to overestimate their abilities and try to achieve goals they know are very hard. That’s why many people drop their resolution list after the first failure, increasing the level of self-criticism.
Are you ready to develop your leadership skills and help your team excel in their individual positions? Check out these New Year’s resolution examples that may help you with your goal setting for 2025.
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Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions For You And Your Team
1. Flexibility
Working from home is a blessing for many but a challenge for others. As a manager, you must help employees balance their work and personal lives even in remote settings. Flexibility boosts productivity when implemented successfully. So, allow your workforce to work extra on Monday and Tuesday when their energy levels are likely higher, and cut them some slack on Friday when they are probably feeling down as the day progresses. If your business has office spaces, you may allow people to come work from there whenever they feel like it. Workation is another option you should be open to. What’s the issue if someone wants to travel to a different location and work at the same time?
2. Offer Support
Leaders tend to talk more and listen less. That’s why one of the top 10 most popular New Year’s resolution examples is asking employees how you can support them. This is the only way a project manager can handle remote teams and make them feel valued and seen. Everyone wants to evolve and learn new things. However, if they don’t feel motivated or supported, their self-esteem will drop. So, create a space where anyone can come whenever they experience challenges, and do your best to offer them guidance. No one wants to feel alone on a battlefield, so offering motivation and insightful tips helps team members thrive and develop their inner talents quickly. When they win, you and your company also win.
3. Be A Role Model
Leading by example couldn’t be missing from your list of New Year’s resolutions. Why? You can’t ask employees to act a certain way when you behave differently. Leadership development requires you to set realistic resolutions and stick to them. When your team members see that you are not just words but you deliver on your promises and goals, they are inspired to do the same. Additionally, when they can see your dedication and commitment, they know that following that same path can lead them to where you are. Don’t be afraid to show vulnerability and admit to mistakes. You must show everyone that you are not infallible and you learn from your wrongdoings. A good goal for the new year is to tell your workforce what you would like to better yourself so they learn that introspection is crucial to evolve and improve.
4. Offer Positive Feedback
If you have trouble giving feedback, getting better at it should be one of your top 10 New Year’s resolutions. It’s your job to drive improvement in your team members, and this can’t happen unless you tell them what needs fixing. Corrective feedback focuses on error patterns and not specific errors. Sure, you may give examples for clarity but don’t turn your feedback into a judgment session. It should be constructive, offering clear guidelines and direction on how to improve in certain areas and explaining how certain behavior patterns impact work or other colleagues. Even negative feedback can be beneficial if done the right way, without sounding authoritative. For every piece of feedback you give, use applicable examples.
5. Loosen Up Your Leadership Boundaries
We don’t know if this is one of the most popular New Year’s resolutions, but we certainly think it should be for all managers. Hierarchy mustn’t be a barrier that keeps you and your employees on different sides of the road. A healthy resolution is to bridge or tear down barriers of time, location, technology, and hierarchy to make employees feel like you are right next to them, in the same boat. For example, how are you discussing your SaaS sales strategy? Are you the one doing all the talking, dictating what’s going to happen? No, this isn’t the way to go. Arrange video calls and listen to other people’s opinions. Try to incorporate less formal communication approaches, including Slack messaging. Don’t make it look like you are unapproachable.
6. Focus On Engagement
Global turnover has reached new highs, meaning that employee engagement and retention should be among your goals for the next year. Are you engaged? Are the people you manage engaged? A New Year resolution idea would be to monitor what hinders engagement both for yourself and your employees. Daily challenges and hurdles may decrease your motivation and drive to produce at a high level. If your employees feel unmotivated, ask them what they need. It could be autonomy, flexibility, or respect. Engagement strategies for eLearning companies should create a workspace where everyone can share their viewpoints and feel heard and valued for their contributions. Development opportunities also increase engagement and help employees thrive. Therefore, you increase your chances of keeping them on your team instead of seeing them resign in search of other opportunities.
7. Celebrate Success
You can’t miss adding employee recognition to your list of top 10 New Year’s resolutions. You love receiving praise, don’t you? So does everyone on your team. Did a team member do a great job with SaaS lead generation and bring in many potential buyers? Congratulate them personally and publicly if you get the chance. Praise can make anyone’s day and boost their engagement. Your job isn’t only to identify mistakes but to have the emotional capacity to celebrate success. Therefore, you increase retention as employees feel valued and want to stay with your company even if a competitor offers them a bit more money. Remember that your goal setting should match your New Year’s intentions, and being compassionate must be included on your list.
8. Psychological Safety
We bet that one of the most popular New Year’s resolutions for your employees would be to have a psychologically safe workplace. It’s easy to get carried away by work and focus on things like startup marketing tactics and campaigns to boost traffic and generate leads. However, for all these efforts to be successful, your team must feel safe and confident to share their opinions and bring new ideas to the table. A smart New Year’s resolution would be to work on your psychological safety tactics, including encouraging every team member to speak openly at meetings. Also, decide how you will handle failure and hand out feedback. Create a safe space for idea sharing, and resolve conflicts before they evolve into something more serious. Only embrace conflict when it is performed in a productive way that challenges people to think outside the box.
9. Accountability And Trust
To foster accountability and self-governance, you must first trust your employees to perform their daily tasks with minimal or no supervision. Give your team members the autonomy they need and be there for them whenever they require help or guidance. Delegative leadership is a style that encourages you to pass responsibilities and not stand over people’s necks checking on what they’re doing 24/7. It’s an ideal goal if you want to foster true ownership and accountability. But how do you do that? The answer is through trust. You must trust they can handle everything on their own, and they should trust your leadership style. When employees trust your procedures and decisions, they don’t doubt you and therefore won’t act outside your direction.
10. Skill Development
We won’t be the first ones to tell you that upskilling and reskilling are among the top 10 most popular New Year’s resolutions. Start with yourself. What new things do you want to learn and which areas do you want to improve on? Find relevant courses online and put them on your quarterly schedule. However, as a manager, you must pay attention to your team members’ development, too. Discuss with each person individually and ask about their goals and expectations. Maybe you can offer them a few new year goal ideas based on their skillset and role. For instance, a marketer may benefit from a course about demand generation best practices to improve at bringing clients to your company. When they start their training, try to free their schedules from their normal responsibilities so they can focus on acquiring new skills.
Self-Leadership Tips To Improve Yourself
1. Try Something That Scares You
Why do you hear so much that it’s important to face your fears? Because fears usually keep us from reaching our full potential and make us camp out in our comfort zones. Whether it’s overcoming fears regarding the unknown or of things we’ve faced in the past and failed, you have to power through. Yes, fear is unwarranted and you can’t control it. However, if you want to be a good role model, you have to tackle the things that make your heart race. Don’t step back until you’ve aced that task. You can’t imagine how much confidence you’ll gain from the experience. This is undoubtedly one of the best New Year’s resolutions you can strive for.
2. Ask For Feedback
One of the many goals that help you be a better person and manager is requesting people’s feedback. Sure, your managers offer you their comments without you asking for them. However, to encourage personal growth, you should ask your team members for their feedback as well. How are you as a leader, and what do you have to improve? At first, they may find it hard to express any negative opinions as people often fear they might receive hostility. Make it clear, though, that you are open to all kinds of feedback and you are open to learning from it. Don’t get defensive if you don’t like what you’re hearing. Listen attentively and do some introspection to understand whether these comments are valid.
3. Do Your Self-Critique
Do you like having a bad or difficult boss? Probably not. Your employees don’t like it either. That’s why one of the most popular New Year’s resolutions is to look yourself in the mirror and identify negative leadership patterns. If you are a perfectionist, for example, you may often set unrealistic expectations for your team, making failure unavoidable. Also, micromanagement is another common problem with managers, stripping employees of autonomy and controlling their every move. Does any of this sound like you? If yes, you need to add self-critique to your list as one of the things to accomplish in your life.
4. Learn How To Communicate
Communication should be one of the top 10 most popular New Year’s resolutions, as it is one of the most problematic areas in professional settings. Managers either don’t explain themselves clearly enough or don’t listen to others carefully. If you don’t express yourself comprehensibly, your team members won’t understand their tasks, and their work may be disappointing. Also, stakeholders may receive unclear information regarding your performance. For example, if you have prepared a market intelligence report, you must communicate its details in the most effective way so everyone involved can understand the results. Don’t take it for granted that everyone gets your lingo; use simple terms to express information.
5. Be Authentic
If you ever read a leadership training guide that doesn’t include authenticity, you’re probably on the wrong guide. Leaders are a lighthouse for employees. When they keep changing directions and can’t make up their minds, team members get lost, and they can’t focus on achieving a goal. Also, no one will trust you if you don’t lead with your personal values and integrity. Every decision you make must be based on these. Even when you fail, you must take accountability and overcome the challenges, keeping your company values and objectives in mind. Seeing your example will help employees adopt the same mindset. Such workplace environments foster creativity, collaboration, and increased productivity.
Key Takeaway
Toward the end of every year, most managers and leaders care more about improving their business function rather than encouraging personal growth. Things around us keep changing; why should you remain the same? The future of digital marketing, for example, is enriched with new trends and directions based on consumer behavior. If you want to keep up with these changes, you should create your list of top 10 New Year’s resolutions and work on it. Break free from what scares you, be your true self, and identify where you’re in the wrong. In sales, professionals always try to use the best B2B customer service examples to improve conversions. You should improve your communication skills, too, to boost retention and engage employees.
What do your team members want? There is no easier way to find out than asking them about their challenges and New Year’s goals. Flexibility, autonomy, motivation, development, and psychological safety are a few of the most popular New Year’s resolutions of the current workforce. Due to remote work, professionals often feel like they don’t receive the support and feedback they need to thrive, feeling alone and dissociated. Do your best to communicate regularly, breaking down hierarchy barriers that create distance. Trust them with their daily responsibilities and let them take accountability for their mistakes and successes. In the end, everyone will thrive, and your company will turn victorious.
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