New Years: An Overrated Time for Change

I hope everyone’s New Year was great and now that we are a few weeks out, let’s have a conversation about the change and how it’s often implemented in January.

Like clockwork, once a year most minds are aligned for change and we are bombarded with far too many new ideas for personal and organizational resolutions. Is the New Year a good time to implement changes?

There are certainly business reasons to begin a change on January 1st, often an organization’s fiscal cycle starts on the New Year. My biggest concern is that, we try to implement 7 different changes in January and tend to overwhelm those who are coming off of holiday and need to catch up and re-connect with their work. From my perspective, rather than getting hung up on January 1st, focus on the first quarter.

Some questions to ask when implementing change are:

1. How many changes can we handle?

I try and stick to 1-2 strong, well communicated business initiatives in the first quarter.

2. How do we announce change?

What’s the best way to communicate to your people and allow them the time to process the change?

3. What are the behaviors we’re asking to change? Be clear, be specific and show how you are going to measure the change.

4. What are we going to stop doing? Tell everyone and make it easy to stop.

5. How do we prioritize? Declare this so that there is no confusion.

Why are we so set on the 1st of the month? January 1st is just a day and other days like January 31st, February 15th, or March 15th can be just as significant of a day. What days that are meaningful to your business? Right after the holidays, when you have a new budget, we tend to slam change in. I usually focus on February because it tends to be a quieter month, so why not spread out the change?  Leaders, be intentional about how much change your followers can handle. Space it out. Give your people the time to prepare and the bandwidth to prepare rather than insert all of the change on January 1st. It’s much more important that change is identified properly, clearly communicated, and executed well.

What do you think about New Years as a time for change and how does using the New Year work for you? Does your organization have a time that works better when implementing change?  We’d love to hear your feedback!