4 Things to Close Out in Your Leadership This Year
Four concrete steps to tackle before year's end: a retrospective and strategy review, clear priorities, a meeting cadence, and a real celebration for your team.
Before the year ends, things usually get pretty turbulent in most companies one more time. Right up until shortly before the holidays, the organization is sprinting to close out year-end business.
Even so, year-end is exactly the right moment to start getting your head into the new year and answer the important questions that will occupy the company in the coming year and give it the orientation it needs.
Here are four things you can tackle with manageable effort before the year is out.
1. Run a year-end retrospective with a strategy review
What went well, what could have gone better? In a retrospective format, you and your team look at the different facets of the company.
How do the numbers look? Were goals reached? Did people work on the right things? Is everyone on the team healthy? Are customers satisfied, and were projects successful?
The strategy review that follows forms the basis for the next steps.
Are the elements of the strategy still current? Do the different perspectives still fit together, with the company, and with the current market and world situation?
Adjusting the strategic content is sometimes quick to do, but sometimes it takes a bit more. In that case, it makes sense to schedule a dedicated slot for the coming year right away, for example a vision review. The real value of the retrospective only emerges once its findings turn into actual adjustments anyway, not just into minutes nobody reads again.
2. Set your priorities and define clear goals
Building on the retro and the review, you can set your priorities.
Which areas do you want to focus on? What's needed next year to reach the bigger goals? Which strategic and operational topics do you want to take on? Which personal and business goals are you pursuing?
From the priorities, which you ideally define together with your team, you then derive the frame for your goals. Here too, only the direction needs to be clear — the specifics can follow during the year itself. With this foundation in place, it's much easier for you and the company to settle into the new year and hit the ground running with all that turn-of-the-year energy.
Ultimately, clear goals help you focus on what matters most, and give the organization the orientation, the alignment, it needs.
3. Establish your meeting cadence
If you don't already have one, now's the right time to start. If you're already working with a meeting cadence, a quick review is worth doing.
We, for instance, work in clear cycles where the bigger meetings, like an annual conference, nest the smaller meetings, like a quarterly conference:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Quarterly
- Yearly
We deliberately dropped Monthly — it didn't prove useful for us. You can of course adjust these cycles to your own needs. That's exactly the point: a cadence isn't a ritual for its own sake, it's the rhythm that makes strategy, goals, and day-to-day work come together in the first place.
It should be clear which topics get discussed in which round. And it should be ensured that these routines drastically cut down other meetings. Ideally, all that's left afterward are "working meetings," and the clear planning noticeably reduces total time spent in meetings.
4. Celebrate the year's close
Last but not least: a year is a long stretch, with everything that entails. A real, in-person party beats any online event. Throw a holiday party, a New Year's party. Celebrate yourselves, celebrate the company, and above all: celebrate together, as people.
And even if the celebration itself won't happen until next year, you can absolutely start planning it right now.
If you'd like, you can take a look at www.rocket-routine.com to see how retrospective, priorities, and meeting cadence can be run within one shared structure, instead of four separate efforts.