New Year’s Resolutions for Your Boss
Resolutions I Wish My Boss Would Make
Bring positive humanity
- Give full attention in every one-on-one.
- Slow conversations when emotions rise.
- Name effort, not just outcomes.
- Assume positive intent before judgment.
Improve clarity
- Translate strategy into today’s priorities.
- Define success before work begins.
Build trust
- Do what you say you will do.
- Admit mistakes quickly and publicly.
- Explain decisions, especially unpopular ones.
- Keep confidences without exception.
Develop people
- Coach before correcting.
- Ask, “What are you learning?” weekly.
- Give feedback within 48 hours.
Create psychological safety
- Invite dissent early, not late.
- Reward truth-telling, not compliance.
- Ask, “What am I missing?”
- Thank people for raising concerns.
Protect focus
- Reduce meetings by 25%.
- Eliminate one recurring report.
- Guard deep-work time for the team.
- Stop honoring exhaustion.
Model growth
- Seek specific feedback.
- Share learnings publicly.
- Change behavior when corrected.
Make meaning
- Connect tasks to people helped.
- Tell stories of impact.
- Clarify why this work matters now.
- Celebrate imperfect progress.
Energize
- End conversations with encouragement.
- Give credit away quickly.
- Notice who is overlooked.
- Measure success by who grows.
These resolutions aren’t management theories. They’re the secret wishes people carry to work every day.
A leader’s resolutions show up in people.
If your boss acted on one of these resolutions, which one would most improve your work experience?
Rethink Your New Year’s Resolution Before it’s too Late
5 Reasons Why You Should Commit Your Goals to Writing – Micharl Hyatt
Hi Dan,
Super list! I narrowed down a bit, but not to ‘one’. Difficult to choose between psychological safety, modeling growth, and energizing? It is the first because fearful hesitant people are never fully in it. But right after that, the other two are powerful !
Wish you and all LF community the best in 2026 ~C
Thanks Cate, Leaders forget they can be intimidating. They might feel like a pussy cat, but position and power make them naturally scary.
Sometimes leaders quietly enjoy feeling power over others.
I think of the best bosses I’ve had, and they resemble these traits. Now I’m looking to model these in the new year. Specifically, Creating Psychological Safety (Ask, “What am I missing?”) so I can be better at Developing People (Coach before correcting.).
Thanks for sharing, and for a great 2025 Dan.
My resolutions are two-fold: reduce meetings by 50% or more! We have to have a “pre-meeting” to discuss agenda and action items for every meeting (staff, Board and major committees – about five out of 18 committees), then he has to create a “meeting packet” to be reviewed before dissemination and then there’s the actual meeting itself!
Second is to stop asking me to investigate “options” then discarding my recommendation to do what he wanted to do in the first place. For one project, I met with two potential vendors and their teams (about 10 hours total), then created side-by-side comparisons with my recommendation – then he just hired a third vendor that he wanted to work with all along.
Second project was to pull three years’ worth of records from the database into Excel (over 10,000 records), organize the data (by year and company), then do a deep dive into 180 records belonging to one company (meaning each record had to be opened and details added to the Excel spreadsheet). Took another 10 hours or so of my time, including six hours over a weekend – because he needed the information ASAP! This information was to be presented at a meeting with an outside regulatory board – we ended up having three meetings with them on this topic – he never used the report and when I tried to introduce the information, it “was not relevant to the discussion.”