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A New Year's Resolution for Leaders

A lot of us are making resolutions this weekend - lose weight, exercise more, get organized, write more blog posts (ok, maybe that's just me!), etc. And a lot of experts (like our friends over at the Harvard Business Review) are making suggestions about what kinds of resolutions we should make.

It occurs to me that, behind every New Year's Resolution, is a desire to do what matters. I'll toast to that. But it also occurs to me that, for most of us, doing what matters also means that we need to figure out how to stop doing things that don't.

Here are 5 purposeful questions you can ask yourself to figure out what doesn't matter anymore:

1. Are we (still) having fun doing it?
2. Is it easy to get people to lead and participate in it?
3. Are people's lives being changed by it?
4. Are we being changed in positive ways by doing it?
5. Would anybody miss it if we stopped doing it?

If you answer no to #1 plus ANY of the other questions, you should stop whatever it is you're doing right now.

If you answer no to any one of these questions, including #1, consider taking a time out from doing it. Take a break. Give it a rest. And see what happens. After a few weeks or months, re-evaluate it and decide whether or not it's worth doing again. Odds are, it won't be.

What New Year's Resolutions are you making this weekend?

Failure Sucks

Must be something in the air but I'm seeing articles everywhere about how to deal with failure. This past weekend an article titled Dealing with failure can sometimes bring success appeared in the Boston Herald.The Harvard Business Review has dedicated their April issue entirely to the topic. Even Scientific American jumped into the conversation with a cover story in March about How Brains Bounce Back: Where We Get The Strength To Go On. Designer and HBR blogger Adam Richardson says failure is the newest fad – "the thing all the cool kids are doing, it's edgy and daring, and it may be bad for you or it may open up inspired new ways of thinking (perhaps both at the same time)." 

Well I'm going to go on record here and say, while some people might think it's cool, I think failure sucks.

So What Matters To You?

I'm having a blast these days working with an old friend who is exploring a possible run for a seat in the United States Congress. He is a great guy and I'm excited just thinking about the impact he could have on the lives of people, in his district and beyond. 

What he has asked me to do is help him find his voice. In other words, to figure out what matters to him and why, and then to help him tell that story in a way that inspires and engages people. He knows this is where it all begins.