Why most resolutions fail — and what actually changes team performance
January has a particular energy.
New plans. Fresh resolve. A sense that this is the moment to reset.
Leadership team members return after the break with renewed intent — clearer goals, sharper priorities, and a shared determination that this will be the year things really move forward.
And yet, experience suggests otherwise.
By March, many teams feel strangely familiar. The pressure has returned. The same conversations resurface. The same tensions sit quietly in the room. The same issues slow decisions and drain energy.
The year has changed.
The leadership team often hasn’t.
The uncomfortable truth is this: most leadership teams don’t change simply because it’s a new year.
The comforting myth of alignment
Ask a leadership team in January whether they’re aligned, and most will say yes.
After all, they share the same strategy deck. They agree on the headlines. Meetings are polite, professional and forward-looking. There’s little open conflict. On the surface, things feel solid.
However, our extensive experience working with senior leadership teams shows that perceived alignment is often very different from lived alignment.
Alignment is not a feeling — it’s observable behaviour.
True alignment shows up when priorities clash, when resources are tight, when difficult trade-offs must be made. It shows up in how quickly decisions are taken, how clearly messages land across the organisation, and how willing leaders are to challenge one another when it really matters.
What I often see when facilitating senior team meetings is agreement in the room, followed by very different interpretations once people return to their functions. Politeness is mistaken for alignment. Harmony is confused with effectiveness.
Why leadership teams don’t change just because it’s January
Leadership teams are made up of capable, experienced individuals. But a collection of strong leaders does not automatically become a strong team.
Over time, every team develops habits — how decisions are made, how disagreement is handled, what gets discussed openly and what gets quietly avoided. These patterns are efficient. They help the team cope with heavy agendas and constant pressure.
But efficiency can easily become inertia.
In my experience, many senior teams sit in a polite version of “norming”, where tensions are present, but muted. True “storming” never really happened, so differences still exist, but are rarely explored. The team stays busy, but rarely sharper.
Without intention, teams don’t progress — they stabilise.
Time alone does not move a team forward. Behaviour does.
What high-performing leadership teams do differently
The leadership teams that genuinely step forward in a new year don’t do so because they have better strategies or more talented individuals.
What distinguishes them is their willingness to pay attention to how they work together.
They talk honestly about what helps them perform at their best — and what quietly gets in the way. They surface tension early rather than letting it leak out through side conversations, slowed decisions or passive resistance.
Crucially, they hold one another to shared standards — not just individual objectives.
A consistent pattern we see in high-performing teams is this: they manage the team with the same discipline they apply to managing the business.
The behaviour shift that changes everything
Real change in leadership teams rarely starts with ambition. It starts with behaviour.
Small, consistent shifts in how leaders show up — how they listen, challenge, decide and follow through — compound quickly. Over time, these behaviours shape trust, pace and accountability far more powerfully than any annual plan.
When facilitating leadership team sessions, one of the most powerful moments is when teams agree not just what they are trying to achieve, but how they expect to behave when:
- Pressure is high
- Opinions differ
- Trade-offs are uncomfortable
- Performance slips
What a team tolerates in January quietly becomes its culture by June.
Three questions worth asking now
January offers a rare pause before momentum takes over. Used well, it creates clarity. Missed, it disappears fast.
Three questions every leadership team would benefit from asking together are:
- What behaviours helped us perform at our best last year — and which ones held us back, even if they felt comfortable?
- Where do we avoid challenge or honest conversation as a team?
- If we continue working exactly as we are now, what will genuinely be different this time next year?
These are not individual reflection questions. They are team conversations — and they require courage.
From intention to intentionality
A team reset is not a workshop slogan or an offsite agenda item. It is a deliberate re-contracting of how the team operates day to day.
It means making the implicit explicit:
- How decisions are really made
- What constructive challenge looks like in practice
- How peers hold one another accountable — especially when it’s uncomfortable
The leadership teams that make this shift early in the year don’t rely on good intentions. They build intentional habits.
The real January choice
January does not guarantee change. It merely offers an invitation.
The year ahead will be busy. Pressure will rise. Trade-offs will be harder than expected. The question is not whether the demands will return — they will.
The real question is whether the leadership team will respond differently when they do.
New year. Same pressures.
Whether it’s the same leadership team is a choice.
If this article resonates and you’d like to explore how your leadership team is really working together — beyond intentions and assumptions — I’d be happy to have a conversation.
You can contact me at jan@quivermanagement.com or via www.quivermanagement.com.