Blog Post

Industry
2 MIN READ

Follow your own path

Darren.Smith's avatar
Darren.Smith
Icon for Advisely Board rankAdvisely Board
19 days ago

With 2025 now upon us, I’m sure your inbox, LinkedIn account and service provider communications are all dominated by reflections on last year and suggestions on how you should shape your 2025. 

While others’ views can be useful for context, it’s entirely possible that they’re not relevant to your current business position, scope and aspirations. This is why it’s important that you undertake a personal and professional review process at regular intervals – not just on January 1st! 

The key goal of this process is to gain absolute clarity on what type of business you want to build and how you want it to operate in the future. This may not change too dramatically from review point to review point – but it might. 

You can do this review as an individual leader or as a leadership team, but the aim is to develop a shared vision that everyone is on board with and understands. Once you have some clarity on this vision, you can run a session with the whole team to better understand what’s important to them as individuals and where they’re looking to develop over the coming 12 months.

From my experience conducting this kind of review process, the greatest impact came from focusing on the capabilities we wanted to improve and grow within our team and determining how that would affect our people, processes, client experience and profitability. We then spent the time communicating all of this and sharing our findings with our whole team.

Having conducted a review, many businesses will find that the “to-do” list is pretty long – and this is where a prioritisation process needs to kick in. Is the impact immediate? Will it occur in a year’s time, or even further out? 

For a lot of businesses, future investments will be dependent on realising savings in time and/or money. Time invested as a leadership group linking the work and effort of your team and initiatives to the outcome and long-term vision is time well spent.

Throughout the paragraphs above, you will have noticed I have intertwined the need to engage your team regularly – understanding what is important to them personally and professionally – with the focus of the business for the coming 12 months.

This is because leadership's most important capability is to engage your team, develop them and get them excited about the future and being part of something special. Building momentum is about your team feeling part of the success and growth in your business. 

In the most successful businesses with strong performance cultures, it’s not just the principal who can articulate the vision and focus; it’s something the whole team understands and believes.

For those businesses with team members, try this exercise:

  • Who can tell me what the vision for our business is?
  • What are the things we have to get right to make this happen?
  • How does doing your role well support this?

Take the initiative now while you still have some time for fresh thinking. After all, it won’t be long before you get wrapped up in the grind.

Updated 18 days ago
Version 2.0
  • jaimie's avatar
    jaimie
    Social Sightseer

    I couldn’t agree moreDarren.Smith!
    I see so many businesses where there is a lack of alignment in clarity of business goals and direction, staff understanding and buy in, down to KPI’s as well as processes. I also think it’s important clients understand the business to help them speak with confidence to potential referrals. 

    • Darren.Smith's avatar
      Darren.Smith
      Icon for Advisely Board rankAdvisely Board

      jaimie  thanks for making that extra point about clients and the further extension of this is business partner or service provider relationships 

  • "In the most successful businesses with strong performance cultures, it’s not just the principal who can articulate the vision and focus; it’s something the whole team understands and believes."

    Great piece Darren.Smith !

    So much of the new-year noise is about what we "should" be doing, but you’re spot on—if it doesn’t align with where the business is actually headed, it’s just a distraction. Prioritising and keeping the team involved in that vision makes all the difference. Great reminder to take a step back before things get too chaotic!

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