
New Year, New Team: Strategies to Turn Your Resolutions into Results

The feeling of a fresh start can be powerful. In fact, research from Harvard Business School’s behavioral economist Katy Milkman, PhD, shows that “temporal landmarks,” like New Year’s, can help individuals both set and achieve behavioral-change goals. On an intuitive level, a lot of people have caught on to this—after all, who hasn’t set a New Year’s resolution before? But still, that doesn’t make behavior change easy (the number of resolutions forgotten in two to three months time highly outnumber those that are accomplished)—and if you’re a leader, you know altering other people’s behavior can be infinitely more challenging than simply changing your own. So, how can you set and achieve the goals you want your team to accomplish in the New Year without reflecting on a resolution graveyard next December? Blend effective strategies from the world of behavioral economics with the innovative use of team resources to succeed—even without full organizational support.
Set the Stage: Make Goals Precise & Motivating
If a new goal is going to be kept, it has to be set up and communicated to your team in a way that’s detailed and encouraging to them. Get buy in and consider potential issues at the start so they don’t lead to disaster later on.
- Don’t Stop at SMART: SMART goals (or those that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) are a classic in any goal-setting situation. You should be using this checklist to create goals for both your team as a whole and the individuals who comprise it, but you don’t have to throw the towel in there. For enhanced goal attainment, leverage insights from behavioral psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, Ph.D.’s take on goal-setting best practices, including outlining specific potential roadblocks and how you’ll supersede them before ever getting a start on accomplishing your goals.
- Keep It Positive: When considering your goals for the year, there might be quite a few things you’re hoping to stomp out (for example, consistent project delays), but research indicates that addressing such issues with a positive reframe might do you and your team more good. In one study at Stockholm University, researchers found that when individuals set accomplishment goals (e.g., deliver projects on time) as opposed to avoidance goals (e.g., have no project delivered past its projected timeline), they were more likely to sustain their resolutions long term.
- Identify Personal Motivators: Just because you’re personally committed to a goal, sadly doesn’t mean your team will be too. Try to connect new team resolution wins to personal motivators, depict the impact attaining such goals will have on the organization as a whole as well as the personal implications for individuals (will they have learned a vital skill for future promotion or increase their bonus at the end of the quarter?). Communication of these specifics matters.
Keep Things Moving: Build Effective Accountability Systems
Having worked in an organization, you may have some experience with accountability structures as they relate to defining specific roles and responsibilities of individuals on a team. However, there are many more ways you can amp up your accountability game, leveraging psychological principles to motivate individuals to own their actions and make more intentional, effective decisions.
- Increase Social Comparison: Checking in on individual goals during a team meeting may feel like a drain on time (and we don’t suggest you spend the majority of time on this in any team meeting) but there is something special about a group dynamic: social pressure. Having individual goal check-ins in front of the team presents the opportunity for two important activities:
- commit to short-term goals (those that will lead them to accomplish their long-term ones) in front of others and
- to report if those goals were accomplished or not. Make sure to provide praise for those who accomplish goals and encourage those who don’t to provide potential corrections to achieving goals in the future as well.
- Provide Guidance Through Follow-up: Following up on a more individual nature can also be essential to success. As a leader, provide guidance to team members as they work to accomplish the goals your team is working on. Taking time to see how things are going and then rework strategies for goal attainment is a critical step of the process and shouldn’t be seen as a set back. Technology like Monark’s 1:1 tool can also help keep track and foster constructive conversations around such topics.
Forge Opportunities: Make Use of Resources Independently
So they gave you the responsibility to lead 8 but none of the structured support to get it done? As terrible as it sounds, that happens more often than not. All hope is not lost though as there are still innovative ways to use the resources you do have at hand to achieve your team goals.
- Invest Team Funds on Training & Development: Depending on the goal you’ve set, it may be wise to enhance your employees’ skills in a particular area of interest. For example, if you intend to increase the speed at which your team responds to external change it may make sense to provide training around navigating challenges and creative problem solving. The specific training you need to accomplish your goals might not be provided by your organization though and that’s when you should venture elsewhere. By leveraging team or individual training stipends and communicating with HR you may be able to get what you need. Seek a provider that can conduct a needs analysis (helping you identify which courses will best align with your goals) and consider putting your whole team in one course together so that they can learn from and motivate each other to complete it. To learn more about how to find a provider that’s right for you, download our e-book, which includes a list of questions to ask potential providers, here.
- Lean on Your Internal Community of Leaders: When your team isn’t given the resources it needs to succeed, it can be easy to feel like you’re the only one in that boat. More than likely though, your coworkers are going through the same thing. This can be an opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade. After all, they have their own yearly goals to accomplish and if you can identify yourself as a potential trusted partner in helping them get there, you may be able to come to an agreement that helps both teams get where they want to go. Try to create a community of leaders you can share your goals with and become a springboard for their own goals. Here you can identify missing resources as a group and see if there are ways you can innovatively divide them so that each team gets what they need.
We won’t sugar coat it. Behavior change is hard, reaching one’s goals and sticking to New Years resolutions is tough—especially when you aren’t given the support necessary to get there. However all of it is doable and if you can implement a few of the suggestions above they should become easier to accomplish. At Monark, we’re wishing you a happy 2025 and the best of luck in accomplishing your goals for the year. If you’d like to learn more about how Monark can help you and your team reach your goals this year, subscribe to our newsletter today or feel free to reach out for more information. We’d love to hear from you.
Want to learn more about how to change and stick to new behaviors in the new year? Check out some of our team’s favorite reads:
- Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones By James Clear
- How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be By Katy Milkman
- Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation By Gabriele Oettingen