Don’t Sleep on Dec 26-31: 5 Leadership Priorities for the Last 5 Days of the Year
If you are anything like me, your restful Christmas break only lasts a day or so before you get antsy and a little bit of cabin fever. Yes, the family events are a blast, and I look forward to each one of them. But due to the feverish pace of November and December in the Independent K-12 and nonprofit world, I don’t expect many of you to unwind for long. Or maybe you unwind quickly (and then rewind a couple of days later). This JSS post will be the last of 2023 and completes the 3-part series (Development Connections in December, Gifts/Books for You Leadership Team, Don’t Sleep on…). The rest of December will be spent doing for our firm the same kinds of things we recommend you doing for yours (plus a lot of reading!).
Days 1-2: Reflection
So, as the year draws to a close, Heads of School and nonprofit Executive Directors face a rare opportunity for quiet reflection, solitude, and strategic planning. In these crucial-to-next-year days, leaders should start at the highest level and conduct a school/nonprofit review of the year's achievements and challenges. At first, you’ll want to gravitate toward the organization's goals, financial health, and program impact. With a fresh recall of the year’s past performance, you should then move on to a human resource focus. Did you show appreciation? Did you recognize certain people? Were you more often telling things or inquiring about others’ perspective? Expressing gratitude to each team member, celebrating successes, and fostering a positive workplace culture are essential steps to wrap up the year on a high note. Taking your time, this should be a two-day exercise (if you stop to take a few people to coffee to thank them for a great year).
Day 3: Strategic Planning
Shift your focus to the future on day 3. Your quiet time on day 3 should be all about strategic planning. We’re not suggesting that you get out dry-erase markers and draw out a SWOT analysis on the dining room wall, but we are also encouraging you to not ignore strategy in the 5-day period where your distractions are minimal. (If you do draw out a SWOT analysis on the dining room wall, we’d appreciate a photo. As they say, “pix or it didn’t happen.”) With a combination of personal reflection and a full blown review of your progress toward your 3-5 year strategic plan, you are ready to set clear and realistic goals for the upcoming year. As you set these goals, break them down into actionable steps for each department and leader. We hope this step will be a joyful one, especially since you just spent two days celebrating and being grateful for the people who lead with you.
Days 4-5: Administrative
The last two days before January 1 are dedicated to essential administrative tasks, ensuring legal compliance, tidying up databases and records, and building a communication plan from your 5-day reflection (just the wire frame - don’t show up on January 1 with 10 pages of communication maxims and methods). Focus on key messages and do your best to set the stage for the upcoming year with a kick-off meeting. Set the rooms up and envision which teams will hear each individual part of your plan. Think about how you’ll want to say each piece of the whole vision for 2024. Focus your efforts on “giving energy to” the people who will further communicate your leadership when your workforce returns from some restful time off.
Generosity Starts Here: 2 Freebies for You
So, there is a little bit of everything in the final 5 days of the year: reflection, gratitude, strategy, big picture, details, and some writing. And we’d like to help you do that. So, to practice the generosity that fuels JSS’ very existence, we would like to give you two tools to guide you in this process. The following items have never been given away. We have used them in paid engagements, keynotes, and other learning environments. But now we want to open-handedly bless you with them. If you want to plan ahead with anyone from our team about your last 5 days of 2023, please reach out!
Data and Administrative Functions: How to Ask the Right Questions About Your Data, Data Processes, and 2023 Administrative Trends
In 2021, I presented THIS SLIDE DECK at the Tennessee Association of Independent Schools (TAIS) Biennial Conference. From it, you can easily form an end-of-year question bank for your team about your data hygiene, reporting procedures, and the people who are responsible for working in your data. It is titled, “You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure,” and the main point of the presentation is that growth is written about, spoken about, and prioritized almost ten times as much as paying attention to the data points that might indicate growth. And we see that as a problem. Take your time in the question sets, write your own questions for your school or nonprofit, and create a few action steps for getting answers to them when the team returns in January.
2. Strategy: How is our school’s/nonprofit’s external environment impacting our performance, profitability, and overall growth? What might be over the horizon?
The three pages LINKED HERE come directly from our Strategic Planning Playbook. Yes, that is pretty valuable IP to us. But we want you to have it and use it as you prepare for 2024. As “watch for rising” becomes a regular part of your leadership, we want to encourage you to examine the external context (or environment) of the work your organization does. Michael Porter’s 5 Forces are particularly helpful for this exercise, so you’ll want to make notes as you consider your own external context. Need a sounding board for this part? We’re only a call away.
From all of us at John Sullivan Solutions, we want to wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We will launch 2024 with a multi-part series about intelligent failing (Edmonson, 2023). We can’t wait to share it with you!
Edmondson, A. C. (2023). Right kind of wrong: The science of failing well. Simon and Schuster.
