LL #45 | End Your Year with a Leadership Review
A lightweight, easeful method for reviewing, intention-setting, and starting next year with a clean slate.
I had a blast running leadership reviews with Rikki these past few weeks.
We liked what we put together so much that we recorded it to make it available to everyone.
If you prefer video/audio, you can watch below. Written instructions are also included for you readers out there 🙂
And if you’re wondering why you might want to do our review, here’s some feedback that we’ve gotten:
Our review process is fun and painless
It grants a realistic perspective on the prior year, which leads many leaders to feel more optimistic about where they’re at
It makes it simple and easeful to take first action steps to unlock your potential in the new year.
Our Review Philosophy
Reviews don’t need to be an arduous process.
Your brain is always collecting data. It’s been doing so since your last review, whether it’s been months, quarters, or years. All that your brain needs is a few prompts to help coalesce that data into insight.
As a result of this belief, our review is lightweight and fast. It’s pithy. The prompts are laser-focused and purposeful. They’re designed to be done quickly. And they’re designed for you to blurt whatever comes from your unconscious. Trust that your mind and body know what needs to be said and seen.
The purpose of reviewing this way is twofold:
To Surface low hanging, high leverage insights
To Connect those insights to clarify underlying themes and drivers
A bonus third: to get clear on benchmarks and first action steps for next year, so you can get the ball rolling with ease.
Our review has three steps:
Review Last Year. Review last year to extract learnings and get perspective.
Intention Set for Next Year. What intentions do you have for next year? What do you want?
Getting Complete on this Year. Get all of the things that are lingering from last year out of your head, onto paper, and into their appropriate action buckets so you can start next year clean.
Enjoy, and let me know your favorite part!
The Review
The goal here isn’t to get it perfect.
It’s likely that in the days and weeks after reviewing, new insights will come to you. Scores may adjust. Intentions may change.
That’s great.
The goal here is to lay the foundation and connect the pieces so that creative process can unfold. Those adjustments will happen because you let yourself get it all out there.
⬅️ Reviewing Last Year
Take 5 minutes MAX to complete each exercise. Use a timer to encourage yourself to blurt.
💯 Rating Yourself
Rate your leadership across eight dimensions.
The goal is to get a quantitative shape of how the year went.
Some guidelines for picking a number:
10 = As good as it gets. You couldn’t imagine having had a better year.
1 = As bad as it gets. You can’t imagine a worse year. The train went off the tracks, the wheels flew off, there was a fire in the engine room and a horse loose in the cafe car.
7 is a cop out and not allowed. 7 is a way of avoiding picking good or bad. If a 7 comes up, choose: is it 6 or 8?
Think what your team or people around you would rate you. Notice if there is an incongruence between that and what you rate yourself.
The goal here is to take an honest account. Higher numbers don’t make you “better”, lower numbers don’t make your “worse”. Use this is an opportunity to non-judgmentally assess where you’re at.
Include 1-3 sentences on why you gave each dimension the score that you did. Consider what went well, what didn’t, and what are the gaps to being a 10.
The Dimensions:
Results + Outcomes. Did you achieve what you wanted to this year? Think hard outcomes. Did you accomplish your goals? This is about whether you hit or missed.
Operations & Execution. Did you execute well? This isn’t about goals but about execution. How were you as an operator? How was your process? Do you feel like you executed at your best?
Communication. How was your communication. Too much? Too little? How was the quality of it? Too specific or vague? Too soft or hard? Just right?
Delegation. How was your delegation this year? Did you delegate enough or too little? Did you keep things that you enjoyed and did well and deligate things to people who did those things well?
Creating & Setting a Vision. Did you get clear on a vision for yourself? Did you make that vision know to your team? Were your people clear on that vision?
Living the Culture. Did you live the culture that you wanted your team to embody? Were you an exemplar?
People Management. Not performance management. How were you with the soft stuff? Handling emotions, relationships, the messy human side of stuff.
Personal Management. How good were you at managing yourself? Your emotions? Your behaviors and coping mechanisms? Many busy leaders struggle in this category.
As you finish, read each category and what you scored it. This will give you a good picture of the shape of your year.
💡 Highlights
What are some of your proudest moments from the past year as a leader? Where have you shined?
Leaders tend to under-celebrate themselves. Let yourself be specific and feel the pride and joy over your proudest accomplishments of the past year.
📉 Lowlights
What are some moments from the year that you’re not so proud of?
The goal isn’t to whip yourself. It’s to let these moments out into the light. By doing so, you can learn from them.
Additionally, leaders often carry the weight of their prior mistakes for years (or maybe that’s just me). This exercise is an opportunity to pull those moments out of you and let yourself feel any shame, anger, blame, or disgust that’s attached to them and leave it here.
In doing so you can clarify the learnings without carrying the burden.
🎓 What are your BIG 3-5 Leadership learnings from the year?
What are your 3-5 biggest learnings from the year?
The objective here is not a big long list. It’s to identify low hanging, high leverage learnings. These are learnings which, were you to embody them going forward, would cause a seismic shift in how you lead and move through the world. They would profoundly improve your outcomes.
Let yourself draw from successes and mistakes. Some of the most valuable learnings come from realizing those things which you are particularly good at.
This can include learnings that coalesced over the year and any new learnings that dropped in today.
🌈 If there was a Theme for your year, what would if have been?
30 seconds. What was the theme? It should be a word or quick turn of phrase.
Looking back at what actually happened, what was the theme of your year?
AND you’re done reviewing last year. Woohoo! Pat yourself on the back. You’ve now rated, celebrated, learned from, and themed last year. Great work.
Intention Setting for Next Year ➡️
🪨 3-5 Big Things
What are the 3-5 BIG things that you want to accomplish next year?
Don’t think too hard about it. What are the big goals that you desire to accomplish next year?
Extremely important: be very clear on how you’ll know that you hit them.
Define these such that the goal posts can’t move. Were you to show your goals to any random stranger at the end of next year, could you come to 100% agreement whether or not you accomplished it?
Rating Next Year 💯
Go back to your ratings from last year.
What categories scores want to change? To either improve, or areas where you over-invested and can go down.
Avoid your desire to make everything a 10. Let yourself be realistic.
Start with your ratings from last year. Notice the most important categories to improve or let up on, and then consider where you realistically can get.
If you’re feeling ambitious, then ask, “where could I get if I stretched.”
Once you have the categories and their new ratings, do two things:
Again, get really clear on how you’ll know if you you accomplished that rating or not.
Choose a first, smallest, measurable action step to kickoff changing that rating. It can be as simple as letting somebody know that you intend to improve in that area, or setting up a meeting to discuss improving it.
🎨 Set Yourself Up For Success
This exercise is looser. It’s like painting a painting or writing a vignette.
Consider, what does your leadership want to look like next year? How do you want the people around you to experience you?
Who is your goals and challenges inviting you to become next year?
Give yourself a few minutes to write freeform.
When you finish that, take a few minutes to determine how you’ll checkin over the course of the year to track how you’re performing against your goals, desired ratings, and vignette. Put it on the calendar so you know that you’ll do it.
Theme Next Year 🌈
Again, 30 seconds. If you were to give next year an aspirational theme, what would it be?
Bonus: at the end of next year, do this exercise again and see what the theme is in retrospect. Did you live the theme that you desired?
I rarely do. Life rarely works that way.
You’re done intention setting! Congratulations. You’ve done the work to get setup for success.
Next is the biggest game-changer of any exercise here: getting complete on this year.
✅ Getting Complete
Why Get Complete?
Too often we hit the ground running with our intentions in the new year, but get jammed up by incomplete projects and tasks that hang over from last year.
This exercise is designed to dump all those lingering things out, nail them down, and decide what to do with them. This lets you start next year with a clean and uncluttered foundation.
How to Get Complete
Using the Trigger list below, write down everything that comes to mind as you read the list.
This is a mind dump. An audit. A purge.
Analyze nothing. You may write things down that you have no intention to complete.
We’ll discuss how to process after.
📝 The Trigger List
This is borrowed from a much longer, whole life guide to getting complete by the Conscious Leadership Group.
Any project you’ve started that isn’t yet completed
Projects that you need to start
Agreements or promises that you’ve made and not fully completed. Consider those made to partners, colleagues, employees, customers, or vendors.
Any communication not yet made. Include communication that you need to make or are waiting to receive.
Any thing that you need to write. Evaluations, Reviews, Proposals, Content or Articles, internally facing documentation.
Meetings that need to be had and haven’t been scheduled.
Any reading or reviewing that needs to be done. Consider reports, industry articles, performance reviews.
Financials. Any forecasting, budgeting, balance sheets to review, investor materials to be created, or if you need to be paid or pay others.
Planning and organizing for the upcoming year: goals or targets to be created, business plans to be made, events to plan, presentations to be planned, conferences or business travel to be booked.
Organization Development: restructuring, job descriptions, new systems to create or implement, succession planning, facilities.
Administration: Legal, compliance personnel or staffing, policies, procedures, training, insurance.
Staff: Hiring, Firing, Letting go, Morale, Feedback, Compensation.
Difficult conversations: tough decisions to be made, areas where you’re on the fence, expectations that need to be (re)set.
Systems to be improved or created: Be picky. Consider your phone, computer(s), software, office equipment, chair, decorations, supplies, organization.
Sales & Marketing: Any cold calls you need to make, leads to close, sales strategies to set, marketing campaigns to run.
Anything that you’re waiting for
Professional Development: Training, Coaching, Updating Linked In or Resume, Research
Bucket with the 4 D’s 🪣
Put everything on the list you just made into one of four buckets:
Do. These are things you intend to do.
Defer. This is something you’d like to do, but doesn’t need to be done now. It can be helpful to add dates for when you plan to do this, or not and simply wait for it to hit a certain level of need.
Delegate. These are things that need to be done, but you don’t need to do them. Include who you will delegate it to and by when.
Delete. This is something that you are choosing not to do. This includes things you think you “should” do but don’t really need to. This is giving yourself permission to no longer think about this thing. You are deciding that you will not do it and no longer worry about it.
One or more of these columns is likely to feel challenging and underutilized by you. Notice that, and try to practice putting more into those columns.
Congratulations. If you did this entire exercise, you’ve done something that will be transformational for you over the coming year.
Watch closely over the coming weeks. The foundation you’ve set and the space you’ve cleared will likely unleash a torrent of creative energy and insight. Have fun with it.
Question(s)❓
Did you review?
Reminder: Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership
Rikki and I put this annual review together to promote our upcoming intensive group coaching program with Dr. Corey Wilks, Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership.
If you or anyone you know is looking to unlock their leadership potential, they can do so in this group coaching program where we’ll workshop:
Leadership values
Limiting beliefs & personal narratives
Imposter syndrome
Strengths and strengths-based delegation
Emotional Intelligence
Balance
It’s priced at roughly 1/6th the cost of 1<>1 coaching and has 3 amazing coaches, so there’ll be even more wisdom to go around.
Hope to see you there!
P.S. This will be the final leadership lab of the year! Happy holidays to all who are celebrating, and I’ll see you again in January.