What’s Your New Year Focus? 3 Solid Ways to Focus on Leadership

A New Year is right around the corner full of great anticipation, excitement and the fulfillment of new hopes and dreams.  I hope yours is full of promise, happiness and many blessings. 

I am really looking forward to the New Year and becoming a more focused leader and professional leadership coach.  I love what I do and serving others in making significant changes in their lives.  I have spent considerable time looking back on 2014 and learning from my experiences, conversations and situations that is going to propel me into making better choices and decisions going forward.  These are valuable lessons; learning what I did right and what I can do differently the next time. Can’t wait to put these into practice. How about you?

What is your leadership vision for yourself, your team and/or your organization?  What enables you to expand your awareness, like a prism, to reach better | more productive and positive decisions?  How are you implementing your vision through this expanded awareness?  These are important questions, certainly only touching the surface of what could be an terrific coaching conversation with an executive, leader or someone who wants to move past merely “coping” or dealing into truly becoming an energized and passionate leader now AND well into their future.

Here are three solid ways that helped me focus on leadership.  They are certainly more, but these stood out. I hope they resonate with some of you.

Leadership Vision ~ Perhaps this may seem obvious, but a clear vision is what creates the context, motivation, buy in, and clarity around the goal(s) to be achieved. If, as a leader you have a “big picture,” but lack a true leadership vision that drills down to the executable details, it only creates uncertainty and ambiguity as to exactly what the end destination fully looks like.  In turn, that can hold you back from knowing exactly what to focus on to drive the desired result.  For example, if you want to build your leadership ability, what’s the vision? What does that look like – in terms of communicating, coaching the team, making decisions, building engagement, etc.?

Leadership Awareness ~ We all view our world through filters.  These filters are our past experiences, conversations, values, assumptions, beliefs, thoughts, emotions and actions.  Why would those who want to lead by any different? They are not and clearly view their world through filters.

Those filters will either limit what we see (such as tunnel vision) or expand what we see (like a prism); and thus impact how we perceive situations and what we think about ourselves, others, and our circumstances. Leaders need to become highly aware of their filters and how those filters affect actions: the number of options you’ll be able to identify, the decisions that you’ll make, and even the behaviors that you’ll form. Understand this for yourself first, and you’ll much more readily be able to identify these patterns in others – providing you with the ability to lead and move others past their blocks and to a higher level of performance much more quickly.

Leadership Implementation – Taking leadership action based on a clear, meaningful vision for yourself, team or organization is what integrates ideas into reality. It’s in taking action, according to your plan, that you develop into the leader you want to be that will, in turn, drive your team and organization to its goals. Your implementation plan should be designed with two aspects – small steps and breakthrough moments.

Small steps are for building initial momentum and progress, trying new approaches, and making adjustments. These small wins prepare you for the breakthrough moments – meaning those with high impact, high value opportunities that you can step into consciously and proactively to propel yourself and your organization forward. On your plan, identify those high potential opportunities and seek to create those moments, instead of waiting for those circumstances to create you.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.  Now, what are your thoughts, emotions and actions going to be? I’d love to hear about them on your leadership journey to your New Year.  Send me a note via email at brad@aperiocoaching.net or on Twitter @bparcells.

In Latin, Aperio means to reveal, uncover, to make clear. Coaching is a powerful process that enables the client to reveal and illuminate their authentic style via a sharp focus on who they are at their core.