The New Year generally starts with a tradition of resolutions and yet most of the time, those resolutions center around our personal lives and goals. I think there’s great value in introspection as it can help to shape successful changes for the future. In the vein of applying resolutions to our professional lives, I ran across an article in Harvard Business Review that I liked, titled Three Questions Executives Should Ask for the New Year, written by Melissa Raffoni.
The full text of the article is worth reading but for the purpose of this blog, we will focus on the author’s three questions:
- If there was only one thing I could do to improve my business, what would it be and how would I make it happen?
- If there was only one thing I could focus on to improve my personal performance, what would that be and how would I make it happen?
- What messages am I not listening to or refusing to confront in my business and personal performance and how am I going to overcome that this year?
My prediction is that companies will need to reassess their leadership attributes in 2010 and shore up the gaps. Leadership doesn’t need to be attached to a title or position, it comes from every level of your organization if you look for it and harvest it. Unfortunately, as Melissa points out many executives don’t get enough out of their employees and they don’t listen well. To increase the effectiveness of this exercise, executives must encourage the same behavior in each of their employees. In particular, Question 3 won’t work at all if your own employees aren’t listening to each other, or your customer, etc. In essence, they’ll have nothing meaningful to tell you if they’re out of touch and uncommitted.
The overall goal for these questions is to get to real change in 2010 and in the process, you may begin to fill in the leadership gaps in your business. While each of these questions has a common theme, no amount of introspection will help without a.) a culture that encourages personal and corporate improvement and b.) an environment of communication and trust. As leaders, perhaps the fourth question should be whether you’ve created a culture that encourages each of your employees to ask the same questions of themselves. If you do, then you’ll have something worthwhile to listen to, and your most meaningful cues for how to improve your business or your personal performance may come from their ideas and observations, not just your own.
