With the Christmas holidays quickly becoming a fading memory and the new year in full-swing, now’s the time to set your goals and intentions for the year ahead.

Here are my tips on what every manager should be doing now to ensure 2020’s a successful year.

This is a great opportunity for some team bonding to get the new year off to a positive start, so consider building a team activity into the session. It doesn’t have to be anything extravagant; an off-site breakfast or lunch is a great way to thank your team for their past efforts and bring everyone together.

Use this time to review the team’s successes, failures etc and set new team goals and targets for the year ahead.

Let the team know you’ll be conducting one-on-ones to discuss performance and to set individual goals which will assist their team to achieve the team goals.

Hold a one-on-one with each of your team members in January to review their performance over the previous year and set intentions and goals for the new year. Discuss personal successes and achievements, areas for improvement, set individual goals for the year ahead, as well as discussing the broader vision and goals of the business and how they fit in to that.

It doesn’t have to be in a formal, meeting room setting – I think a coffee catch up in an external setting is ideal. You want your team members to feel relaxed and comfortable so you can have an open and productive conversation.

Did your one-on-one’s highlight that your team are feeling overloaded and under pressure? or, do you have a big project coming up that will require additional labour? Now’s the time to sit down and establish exactly what you need in terms of skill set and whether you can cover this internally. If not, now’s the time to plan for new hires and work on building position descriptions, an on-boarding plan and think about how you would like the recruitment to be managed.

There are a number of relatively simple ways to do this including:

Before you get settled and comfortable in the day to day, think about what you might be able to do differently this year. Be brave! Be bold! Shake things up! Just don’t fall into the trap of doing everything the same way that you always have.

Here are some ideas:

A new year marks a new beginning. It’s the ideal time to reflect and make sure you’re being the best leader you possibly can be and are setting yourself up for your best year yet!

5 Management tips for a successful new year

Mansfield & Co Recruitment