A new era

Have you ever noticed how unique the feeling of a new year is?
And have you noticed how quickly that feeling fades and turns back into normalness?

Each new year creates this question for most people:

“What’s going to be different about this year?”

This question gets minds busy working on declarations like…

This will be the year I get in shape.
This will be the year I assert myself more.
This will be the year I become a better listener.
This will be the year I truly lock in.
This will be the year I get the hell out of this place.

Hopefully none of your best people are thinking that last one…but this post will certainly help if they are thinking that, or anything like it.

These moments (meaning weeks like this week) matter because they give us an unusual permission to talk about things and change things more easily than we can almost any other time of year…a chance to establish exactly what will be different about this year.

Want to wipe the team’s calendar clean and start fresh? Want to shift where energy is spent? Want to start some new habits and end some old ones? Done this week, nobody will blink…and most will try to see the benefits with fresh eyes.

The same discussions, had in April or August, just won’t quite work the same way.

Human beings like the concept of fresh starts and new eras. This is something worth paying attention to: as leaders and people managers, “eras” are a powerful tool that you can use a few times per year to make change feel easy, obvious, and natural.

Eras, of course, let us change things at the surface level: they give us permission to change our priorities, our goals, and our actions. Maybe this next era will be about you better integrating AI into your team’s work. Maybe it’s about becoming faster, more decisive, or hitting reset on your calendar, deleting everything, like I mentioned above.

But where new eras matter most isn’t at the surface.

New eras really work because they loosen something deeper: they give us space to challenge and update the foundational principles that steer our thinking and decisions.

Everyone has principles in their mind. These are the assumptions they operate from, and they usually hatch from people’s personalities and lived experience. Most people’s assumptions and principles are the factory defaults and priors you get to inherit when they join your team. Friendly people hold the principle of being friendly. Competitive people hold the principle of being competitive. Organized people hold the principle of keeping things tidy while less orderly people have the principle of just chill out…it’ll be fine. Those who have been burned might have the principle of trust no one.

We want our next era, this coming year, to be filled with ideal principles, not inherited ones.

Depending on your personality, principles can be easier or harder to see (both in yourself and in others), so let me try to help anyone who feels like this stuff is vague or invisible. People continually reveal their principles in their words and actions, and it’s an invaluable form of leadership intuition to pick up on this stuff. The easiest way? Pay close attention to how people treat the work and how they treat each other.

The principles you will see clearest will always center around the same things:

• Quality

• Speed

• Urgency

• Risk and Courage

• Accountability and Ownership

• Taste and Quality of Thinking

• How to treat people

• Beneficiaries: who wins…who the work and effort is really for

Just think of one person on your team to start. Can you see how each of these is wired in their mind? Now, take a second person and go back through the list again. Notice something: two people on your team, even doing very similar work, might have entirely different principles in mind as they work.

Nobody is neutral: people go fast or slow because of something they believe deeper down. They do or don’t show courage or speak up because of what they believe will happen if they do. They treat other people with respect or disrespect because, deeper down, they believe it is correct, appropriate, and effective to do things that way.

They believe what they are doing is right, justified by their principles.

When you see something at the surface, recognize there is something deeper driving it. When you see something you don’t like at the surface, recognize that you might not be able to fix the thing you don’t like without fixing the deeper principle first.

How do we know the “right” principles? Great question. The answer is surprisingly simple, but requires seeing a bigger picture: principles should always be derived from the outcomes we want, not hatched from our personalities and impulses. We derive the ideal principles for everything in that list above by working backwards.

One of the things that you come to grips with after leading for a while is that you are very much in the business of understanding and altering people’s deepest assumptions. No principle should live in a person’s mind because it’s the most natural thing for them to default to. Every single principle needs to be derived from the same source: what outcomes are we actually trying to get?

These more objective principles work like basic logic:

IF we are trying to build the best product that the market loves

THEN, we must operate from the principle of…

…extreme taste and quality of thinking.
…having the courage to admit everywhere we fall short.
…having the ego control to prioritize getting it right over being right.
…having the emotional maturity to handle mistakes well.
…ensuring our customer benefits, not just our company.

Your team’s principles, beliefs, and assumptions can be totally logical. And once they are, people will consistently make better choices about their work and each other. When they falter, which they will, it’ll also be easier and more rational when you talk about it.

So, consider the unique opportunity you have this week as a chance to think through both the surface and the deeper stuff your team can recalibrate.

No pressure, but it’s a big opportunity.

How to bring it to life

For paid subscribers, I’ll always share concrete tactics you can jump straight into. I’m assuming you’re “all in” on becoming a top 0.1% leader and you’re ready to act on these posts. This year is going to be packed with easy, big wins, and also a few things that aren’t so easy, perfect for those of you who love deep thinking.

If you follow the framework and ideas below, this will take you about 1-2 hours of work this week, but it’ll create that “fresh start, sharper minds” feeling you might be looking for this year.

Paid Subscribers get even more.