Like most people, you’ve just completed your first big week back in the office after the holidays. You are also 11 days into New Year resolutions, goals, objectives, promises to yourself or commitments — whatever you would like to call them. Sad but true, many of you will abandon all of these by mid-January.
Funnily enough, there’s even a day to honour this reality. “Ditch New Year’s Resolutions Day” is celebrated on Jan 17, which surveys show is the most common date to give up on resolutions.
Some of you might be wondering what would be the point in making any resolutions, given the low chances of follow-through. But others among you might be asking how you can take yourself and those great intentions well past Jan 17 and truly carry them out throughout 2016.
For a start, simply stating your resolution will get you nowhere. But if you keep reminding yourself of the reason or motivation behind each resolution, your intentions and commitments will become great anchors to help you get to where you want to go.
As a leader, you probably have made some resolutions, too. Maybe you want to spend more time coaching your people or to complete your PMS forms on time. With that in mind, here are four leadership commitments you should make to help your people reach their full potential in 2016.
Change your focus from training to learning and development: Training is important to give people new skills. But looking at people’s performance only through the training lens provides a very short-term, event-based perspective. Learning and development is bigger-picture proposition and considers the larger journey of growth.
The more you think about people development within the larger context of people in their jobs rather than as discreet training events, the more successful that development will be.
Switch your focus from weaknesses to blind spots: It’s safe to say that trying to correct a person’s weaknesses is generally a wasted effort as adults do not change much. Instead of trying to fix weaknesses, help people recognise what their blind spots are. Essentially, blind spots are those potentially debilitating weaknesses of which they are unaware, but that can be avoided.
It is the leader’s role to put people in positions that allow them to play to their strengths, while minimising the situations where their weaknesses can undermine them. Work with your employees to identify ways they can increase their awareness of blind spots and create ways to avoid them.
Upgrade from individual development plans to ongoing development conversations: Most organisations update the individual development plan once or twice a year — and then it goes back on the shelf. Instead of thinking about development only occasionally, I’d suggest that we need to start talking about it all the time.
Make development an everyday topic of discussion. For example, when you talk about an upcoming project, ask your team members what they expect to learn from this project. When reviewing sales performance, ask what lessons we can apply elsewhere. At the end of each meeting, ask participants how the meeting was of value to them.
Shift from developing your employees to developing yourself: As leaders, you have to take the responsibility of being role models for your staff. Others will look up to the behaviour that you demonstrate as a leader.
By making your development a priority, by reflecting regularly on lessons learned, and by asking your team for feedback on your performance, not only will you become a better leader, you will also show your people how important development is. Most importantly, you will demonstrate that development really is an everyday, ongoing process.
If you want to up your game in 2016, take these New Year’s leadership commitments and resolutions to your heart and start putting them into action today.
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand's leading Organisation and People Development Consultancy. She can be reached by e-mail at arinya_t@apm.co.th or https://www.linkedin.com/pub/arinya-talerngsri/a/81a/53b
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