Be a Managerial Mozart in 2024

If you're still floundering to find a New Year's Resolution for 2024, consider taking a few minor steps to become a brand new leader in January, a virtual Leonardo Da Vinci of Leaders and a Managerial Mozart. Here's how you can do that:

• Resolve to identify yourself as a leader who builds the team problem solving muscles of ALL those who work for you. Be there to mentor the organization and build people, instead of seeking heroes to make broken processes work. This also means eliminating blame from your toolkit. That's right, you can only blame processes from now on, avoiding at all costs the idea that someone is to blame. Something goes wrong? What part of the process led to that issue, rather than "who done it" -- you're not the answer person anymore, you're the coach who helps teams figure out how to solve their process related problems.

• Close behind #1 is to resolve that your role as a leader is to build a world-class organization that ENDURES. This is probably the biggest pill you'll swallow, but shareholder supremacy is NOT THE OBJECTIVE of the company, regardless of what Milton Friedman and Jack Welch preposterously propagated during their reigns of error. You are there to optimize the system, yielding an organization that thrives well beyond this year, this decade and even this century.

• Rid your organization of any metrics that are not related to this order of prioritized measurements, and drive safety, quality and delivery hard. Know that the more you concentrate on these three metrics, the better you will be at delighting both your customers and your employees (which translates into the highly coveted employee engagement everyone seeks), while also reducing your costs (answering the shareholder calls for higher earnings).

These three steps alone will create a massive shift in your performance as a leader, but these aren't the only ones.

• Drive the point every chance you get, that your employees are capable of solving the problems that will help them hit the company targets. Align everybody around your vision and the targets that will accomplish your vision, and then give them the ability to close the gap between their targets and their current state, on a daily basis.

• Ask your leaders to have those with the most knowledge about their processes, i.e. the one's who do the real work to make products/services for your customers, solve their own problems (instead of using sharp shooting experts). Tell your leaders their job is to "build the problem solving muscles of their teams."

That's it. Propagate this thinking into all of your leaders by setting the example, and you will see immediate improvements in your organization, regardless of what you are making or serving for your customers.

Watch an extensive podcast on this subject here: