How to Get Your Leadership Resolutions Back on Track

A new year brings with it the promise of change, but desire quickly gets crowded out by reality. Lists of resolutions are made and then fade.

Part of the problem is the length of the lists themselves. When it comes to making meaningful change in how you show up as a leader this year, less is more.

You can improve your odds of success by reducing the number of items on your leadership improvement list down to the one or two things that would make the biggest difference. For now, forget about the other eight or nine things that might have been on your list. Practice what the Japanese call kaizen - continuous improvement through small steps. Or as the great basketball coach John Wooden said, "When you do little things each day, eventually big things occur."

How do you decide what you should focus on?

One way to get started is to complete the free leadership self assessment based on my book The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success. The self-assessment will take you a little over five minutes to complete and will give you a picture of how you stack up on the three key components of leadership presence - personal presence, team presence and organizational presence.

Once you've taken the self assessment, take a look at this video coaching segment from the Complete Next Level Self Assessment Report. In it, I'll tell you how to focus your improvement efforts on the vital things that are relatively easy to do and highly likely to make a big difference.

Over the next two months, I'll be sharing more ideas and video coaching segments about how to become a better leader in 2012 by taking little steps that make a big difference.