Wow, we made it to 2021!  For most of us, this week is when we hit the ground running after the holiday break.  I hope that you enjoyed a well-deserved pause over the holidays. As you leave 2020 behind, what is the greatest accomplishment that you can celebrate?  Be sure to celebrate in your own way!

You know that I am passionate about helping leaders become more confident in having better conversations that bolster their success.  Today I want to offer some new insights and reflection, and share some of the articles that I wrote in 2020 that are relevant to supporting you to make 2021 a great year!

Moving Forward!  The new year usually brings a renewed spirit and hopefulness for great things to happen in our lives, like a mini reset.  2020 was a challenging year and has changed the manner in which we think about some things. And in some ways that is a good thing.  We all will have a story to tell once we move past this pandemic.  For some of us it proved to be a very difficult year while some of us found some silver linings. Yet for most of us, we felt a sense of loss and confusion that rocked our resilience and well-being. Whatever that was for you, believe me that there are many valuable learnings from these experiences that you may not realize.

Looking back through these experiences are helpful as they reveal some key indicators, like “lagging” indicators in a business sense that help you understand your performance metrics.  They are in the past and you can’t change them. However, these learnings can be powerful catalysts to creating your “leading” indicators.  By reflecting on these, you can adopt new actions or behaviors that will greatly influence your future through better decision-making.  This is akin to receiving feedback from yourself. And you have maybe heard me say that feedback is merely feedback but what you do with it what is most important.

Based on my engagement with my clients this past year, I will share a few key insights from our work together that have helped improve their leadership effectiveness and personal self-awareness.  These may resonate with you too:

1) Leading teams remotely is a new experience to many leaders, and they have learned new ways of leading and communication.

2) Leaders have maintained their performance expectations of their teams, but shifted their way of working to achieve the team’s results.

3) Leaders have grown their self-awareness by recognizing how they have reacted to their biggest challenges.  They have worked on shifting their mindset by bolstering their resilience and adopting self-care strategies.

4) Leaders have developed and/or leveraged their soft skills to support their teams in order to retain connection, performance, and engagement within the team.

5) Leaders have admitted to missing the informal water cooler chats and face to face interactions of the office environment, but have adopted new and creative ways to retain these connections and build their network.

Take a moment to reflect, what learnings have you taken away from 2020?  What one or two things do you want to focus on for this year?  What actions and behaviors can you take and/or shift to produce a different result in your life or work?

Do you have your strategy defined?  If not, let’s chat about that.  I welcome the opportunity to pull up for a complimentary strategy session to get you started.  Let’s do this!