Pencil, paper, and a dose honest reflection can make you a better manager as well as a better person in the coming year.
In Three Steps to be a Better Leader in 2009, on Harvard Business Publishing, Wharton School professor Stew Friedman lays out the process in more detail than shown here:
- Look back at where you have come from
- Define your personal leadership vision
- Take the four-way view
The last involves understanding how your time is spent today (work, home, community, self) and mapping out a plan to allocate more time for what you really feel is important in life.
At the start of a new year this simple self-evaluation "is a necessary component of your foundation as you cultivate your leadership identity and advance your leadership capacity to the next level," says Friedman.
Sean Silverthorne
Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001.
Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily's first journalist based in Silicon Valley.
