While changing something big in your work or personal life, such as sharpening your leadership skills, is never a challenge invented for the New Year, the beginning of a new cycle offers the best excuse to take action.

In a landscape of broken leadership development programmes, here we share three recommendations for improving your leadership capabilities – not just in 2025, but forever. It's not a tweak but a dramatic shift or realignment.

Caveats to consider BEFORE working on your leadership skills

There are two important caveats to consider before working on your leadership capability.

• The world is changing fast, and your organisation is changing at least as fast as the external environment (otherwise, you will be out of business), what worked brilliantly today will not necessarily work for you tomorrow.
• You lead in context. No generic ‘do this as a leader’ can ever work for all circumstances, in all geographies and in all types of organisations for all time. Your priorities will not necessarily be identical to those of your colleagues down the corridor. The priorities for your workplace will be different from those of another organisation next door, let alone in another country.

Ask your team members to each list three things they want you to do differently

Recommendation one: Reflect and investigate

This leads to my first recommendation: reflect carefully on your own priorities.  Do not believe the so-called ‘guru’ who tells you ‘these are the imperatives for 2025’, or ‘Three key actions now for more effective leadership.’’

If reflecting on what went right and what went wrong does not deliver for you, do what every leader should do regularly:  undertake fieldwork.

Ask your team members to each list three things they want you to do differently, and three things you should continue to do.  Ask for a quick ‘off the top of the head’ reaction. You should end up with a list of tasks, big and small, that can kickstart your reflection process. Use the list as options that need to be processed and evaluated as a way to proceed, not mandates.

Recommendation two: Assemble your gang

The Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, put it more elegantly in the 1970s when he talked about zones of proximal development (ZPDs).  Based on research and observation of children, he realised that learning and gaining new competencies was more effective if these processes were completed in small groups of learners at roughly the same stage of development. 

Learning together and learning from others sped up the learning process and broadened the knowledge and skills acquired. What you could learn with colleagues was far greater than solo efforts.

Seek out work colleagues or friends with similar job demands and see if you can spend dedicated time helping each other tackle your most significant challenges. Take this as an opportunity to raise the collective intelligence of leaders.

Reflective leaders tend to improve because they are aware of their own shortcomings or successes.

This is not a process of telling each other what to do, more an opportunity to explore the priority in depth together.  If you need more on this, read the Action Learning chapter in my leadership book:  Building Leadership Development Programmes…. that Work! (Kogan Page, 2016).

Using this methodology, you exceed your expectations, create a common framework for working on challenges and build consensus on the best way to proceed. If the group is based in the same organisation, you will manage to set overall standards and develop a common approach to leadership without even trying! And those you lead will appreciate this consistency.

Recommendation three: Take note(s)

Finally, get in the habit of journalling or noting down your leadership skills journey. If you become a conscious leader who thinks about what works and what doesn’t and who reflects on successes and challenges on, at least, a weekly basis, you become a better leader.

Simply by paying it some attention you get better at it. Reflective leaders tend to improve because they are aware of their own shortcomings or successes. Unconscious leaders do not because if it does not work, they move on; if it does, it rarely gets embedded into their practice. The whole process is haphazard.

A good time to enhance your leadership skills 

Why not use the turn of the new year to strengthen your leadership skills and explore some of the processes that underpin what you do? It could change your approach forever and your team will deeply appreciate this.