Make These Leadership Resolutions for 2025
A new year brings fresh challenges and opportunities. Whether you historically make resolutions at the end of each year, taking the time to craft leadership resolutions for 2025 can help set yourself, your team, and your organization up for success.
It’s our hope that these 10 leadership resolutions will guide you as the holidays fade and the work begins anew.
Leadership Resolutions for Leading Yourself
Self-Leadership Tips for the New Year
1. Notice how you talk to yourself.
Research shows that self-talk is powerful, whether you’re speaking out loud, thinking to yourself, or writing in a journal.
In fact, constructive self-talk is positively related to increased creativity and leadership skill, along with decreased job strain. Negative self-talk, on the other hand, can become habitual and lead to faulty decision-making, increased anxiety, and high levels of stress and rumination that ultimately lead to burnout.
In short, your words matter, even if you’re the only one who hears them! So, resolve to show yourself a bit more compassion.
To lead yourself compassionately and effectively, read The Power of Positive Self-Talk for Leaders.
2. Embrace a more authentic leadership style.
Think back to when you first started to define yourself as a “leader” or “executive.” In those moments, it’s quite normal to push away parts of your own personality and humanness to align with the expectations of how you should appear.
However, experience tells us that people trust us more when we’re true to ourselves — and trust makes it possible to get things done. This is why it’s so important to embrace an authentic leadership style, one in which you bring your whole self to your work, leading with your values, your integrity, and your vulnerability. In addition to increasing your overall happiness, organizations that foster authentic behavior can improve employee trust, enhance creativity and collaboration, and increase effectiveness.
Now is the time to start building a more authentic leadership style. Read What Is Authentic Leadership, and Why Does It Matter?
3. Stop striving for work-life balance. Create integration, instead.
Most people walking the tightrope toward “work-life balance” will tell you they stumble more than they succeed. That’s because the idea of splitting days into equal parts work and life isn’t realistic. Instead, our research recommends shifting to the idea of work-life integration.
This approach is a matter of choices and tradeoffs versus achieving a balanced equation. It means sometimes you might work on weekends, while other times you tackle personal tasks during the workday. The goal is to transition easily between activities that bring you fulfillment, regardless of when or where they happen. Greater work-life integration is about feeling energized by what you’re doing in all parts of your life, allowing you to channel that energy into what’s important at work and in life.
Begin this new approach by reading Why Leaders Should Aim for Work-Life Integration Over Work-Life Balance.
Leadership Resolutions if You’re Leading Others
Ways to Grow as a Leader in 2025
4. Give effective feedback that helps colleagues succeed.
As a leader, it’s your job to know how to give feedback — whether during a performance review or a more casual coaching conversation. Feedback that’s unclear, authoritative, or even judgmental serves neither you nor your direct report.
Effective feedback, on the other hand, is developmental. It gives recipients specific, direct, and constructive information to help them understand exactly what they did in a particular situation and the impact that behavior had on other people or the organization. Even negative feedback, when delivered with careful thought and planning, can be a valuable tool.
Help yourself and your colleagues give feedback that empowers others to succeed. Read How to Give Feedback Most Effectively.
5. Support your employees in their development.
Professional development is important for everyone on your team. And our research has found that the primary predictor of the success of leadership development programs is the degree to which participants’ bosses support them. So, how can you support each person’s growth?
Resolve to implement the following:
- Set the stage for any learning opportunities by discussing with your direct reports their goals, areas they should focus on, and how they can get the most out of each development opportunity.
- Give them permission to focus their attention on training by allowing them to disengage fully from normal responsibilities.
- Find out what support they’ll need when the intensive part of their program is done.
- Follow up after a development experience by meeting with your team members to discuss what they learned, how they’ll apply it, and what you can do to continue supporting them.
For more, read Why & How to Show Boss Support for Your Employees’ Development.
6. Break down silos with boundary spanning leadership.
All too often — as humans, global citizens, and leaders — we focus on what divides us rather than what unites us. When this “us” versus “them” mentality permeates an organization, relationships fracture, silos grow taller, innovation falters, and results suffer.
The opposite is true, however, when we see executives transform from managers who defend their boundaries to leaders who practice spanning boundaries. Developing the collaborative skills, mindset, and behaviors of boundary spanning leadership prepares you to work with a variety of colleagues from different positions, business functions, backgrounds, locations, and experiences.
Through our research, we’ve found that leaders and organizations that effectively span boundaries do so in 3 ways: managing boundaries, forging common ground, and discovering new frontiers.
Learn more by reading Why You Should Collaborate Across Boundaries.
7. Evaluate and nurture your team effectiveness.
Over time your team’s composition will likely fluctuate, so it’s important to consider how types of talent and skills are combined and integrated on a team. All-stars and “non-stars” both play critical roles in achieving overall objectives.
As you hire team members and work to cultivate healthy interactions on existing teams, consider the 4 components of our Team Effectiveness Framework: core, collective mindset, cohesive relationships, and connection.
For more, read Build High-Performing Teams With Our Team Effectiveness Framework.
Leadership Resolutions if You’re Leading an Organization
How to Position Your Organization for Success
8. Improve retention by paying attention to employee engagement at every level.
Employee engagement and retention have become more important than ever. You can boost them both by paying attention to the 4 key factors that drive employee engagement. Resolve to monitor each level closely:
- Leader engagement: Frontline managers typically lead the biggest population of workers at most organizations — yet many frontline leaders lack critical skills, and as a result, those they manage feel uninspired, unempowered, and unhappy. Support and develop these managers to build greater trust and loyalty across your entire workforce.
- Job engagement: Engage employees by showing them how their job matters. Connect their daily responsibilities to the goals and outcomes of the business of the organization and give them flexibility and autonomy to get the job done — especially when they’re working remotely.
- Team engagement: A team’s success often depends on how well team members work together and how much they trust each other. Work to create an environment where team members can count on each other and feel safe expressing their opinions.
- Organizational engagement: Employees who feel supported by and connected to their organizations are more likely to stay engaged — and less likely to leave. Provide opportunities for employee growth and development to increase engagement at the organizational level.
For more, read Focused on Improving Employee Engagement? Pay Attention to These 4 Factors.
9. Create a psychologically safe workplace.
How do you foster trust, creativity, collaboration, and innovation in an organization and get people to leverage their full potential? By creating safe spaces to take risks at work — the foundation of psychological safety.
Resolve to create more psychological safety by helping your employees feel trusted and respected by taking any of the following actions:
- Make psychological safety an explicit priority.
- Facilitate everyone speaking up.
- Establish norms for how failure is handled.
- Create space for new ideas.
- Embrace productive conflict.
Get started by reading How Leaders Can Build Psychological Safety at Work.
10. Commit to making a positive impact on employee health & wellbeing.
Professionals everywhere are continuing to reshape their relationships with work. Your teams are prioritizing agency, a sense of purpose, and opportunities for growth and development. And with an approximate $800 billion a year in the US spent on unwell workers, your organization simply cannot afford to ignore this trend.
Now is the time to commit to strategies and tools that support employee growth, learning, and wellbeing. Because when an employee feels lifted up by their leaders, they do their part to lift up their organization.
Learn the 5 critical elements of a learning culture. Watch our webinar How Leaders Can Foster a Culture of Learning & Wellbeing.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Make sure you and your organization are positioned to achieve your leadership resolutions and goals for the year. Whether you’re looking for leadership development programs for leaders at every level, team leadership development, or even an organizational culture transformation, we can partner with you to craft a leadership solution that works.
