Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and golajiving. This is the seven Minute Leadership Podcast with your host Paul Fellovledo. Hello everyone, and welcome to this seven minute leadership podcast. It's episode five point fifty one. Today we're diving into something seasonal, something memorable, and something you can use to reset your leadership heading into a new year. I'm calling
this one the twelve Days of Leadership. Think of this as a leadership countdown that becomes a daily challenge. Each day stacks on top of the last one, and by day twelve you feel like a leader who rebuilt their entire operating system. You can turn this into a team challenge, a personal challenge, a department wide challenge, lenge, and even use it to replace the lyrics in the song. So
let's start with Day one one silent observation. Spend one full day watching your team without interrupting coaching or jumping in. Leaders forget that people act differently when the boss is talking. You find out a lot when you go quiet and let the room show you the truth. Day two two conversations you've been avoiding. Every leader has two conversations that they've been pushing off. Today is about clearing that backlog. Pick the two that matter most and handle them respectfully
and directly. Leaders grow when they stop delaying the inevitable. Day three three genuine thank yous, not surface level appreciation. These are real thank yous that acknowledge effort, not outcomes. Recognize something specific about what they did. Remember that type of message for a long time. Day four four quick fixes. Look around your workspace, your fleet, systems, or schedule and clean up four things that have been annoying everyone. Loose ends,
drain morale. Leaders can remove friction in minutes when they focus on it. Day five five minutes of stillness. These five minutes reset your brain. No noise, no phone, no distraction. Leaders make better decisions when they're not carrying mental clutter. This becomes your default reset button for the rest of the year. Day six six honest check ins. Walk up to six people and ask one simple question, how are
things going for you here? And then listen. You get a temperature reading of the culture faster than any survey. Day seven seven opportunities to improve tomorrow. Your job today is to identify seven things that, if improved would make your team's day easier. You don't need to fix them today, you only need to recognize them. Awareness changes your leadership posture more than you realize. Day eight eight stretches of your comfort zone. Pick eight small things that push you.
Maybe it is holding a tougher line, speaking up sooner, delegating better, or asking for feedback. Leadership is a contact sport and comfort zone shrink careers. Day nine nine wins you normally overlook. Write down nine wins that your team achieved recently. Leaders often focus on the fires they had to put out. Morale will rise when you spot the quiet victories that truly mattered. Ten percent more energy. Decide that today you're going to bring ten percent more energy
to every interaction. Teams mirror the tone of their leader. Leaders who bring energy bring momentum. Day eleven eleven messages of clarity. Leaders underestimate how often employees walk away confused. Find eleven moments today where you can add clarity, expectations, timeliness, decisions, directions, all of it. Clarity solves more problems than urgency ever will. In Day twelve, twelve minutes of reflection, Set a timer
and write what you learned. Across these twelve days. Reflection is the difference between going through leadership and growing through leadership. The best leaders I know schedule reflection before they schedule action. Now here's the twist. If you do this challenge with your team, the impact multiplies. People feel, seen, workflows titan, the culture starts to settle into place. You become a leader who leads with intention instead of reaction. Teams fall
apart when leaders react, teams rise when leaders prepare. The twelve Days of leadership is how you prepare yourself to go into a new year already winning. It's simple, it's tactical, and I think it works every time. Start this today, do it with your team, make it a yearly tradition, and with that, let's land this episode back at the North Pole. When you stack these twelve days on top of each other, you rebuild your leadership foundation one day
at a time. If you finish this challenge, you will feel sharp, clearer, and more aligned than you've been all year long. And I know I've mentioned this before, but if YouTube is your platform, jump on over to YouTube and check out my recently rebranded seven Minute Leadership channel. The link is in the description of the show and
also on my website. I'm constantly adding leadership short videos, some select full length episodes of this podcast, and it will be the future home to video interviews as well. This has been the seven minute leadership podcast and I thank you for listening. For more Paul fell of Alito Podcasts, visit paulfellowalito dot com.