I was excited when Patrick, a seasoned sales director, agreed to speak at my team’s annual kick-off meeting. The previous year had been one of our team’s strongest, with everyone finding new opportunities and improving operating conditions for the whole company. ALSO READ: Embrace your inner cheerleader Patrick was our most important internal customer, and I expected him to tell us what to prioritise and improve in the year ahead. What he actually shared astounded me. After acknowledging our past achievements, he just said: “I want you to show me how much further you can go this year.” ALSO READ: The art of encouraging initiative The impact on the room was electrifying. Team members leaned forward, and I could sense their minds racing, considering all the new opportunities we could explore. In the year that followed, we totally overachieved our goals. Looking back, much of that success came from the trust Patrick placed in us at exactly the right moment. Experiences like this are a useful reminder of how much influence leaders have in shaping outcomes. The start of a new year is the perfect time to reflect on your role in creating conditions that help the people around you succeed. In my experience, these four things are particularly powerful: inspiring the team to set ambitious goals, establishing a regular rhythm for reviewing progress, sending clear signals that constructive effort is valued, and helping high-performing teams stay grounded so others are inspired by their success. I have always prioritised time together for my teams, particularly regular offsite meetings with open agendas so ambitious goals can be talked into existence. Creating space to share ideas and explore possibilities helps people see that those ambitions are both valuable and achievable. It challenges people to be creative and to come up with innovative options. It also builds a shared understanding of what the team is working towards, and how individuals can support one another along the way. Once a team genuinely owns its aspirations, the next challenge is sustaining momentum. In recent years, many organisations have chosen to address this by shifting away from annual performance reviews in favour of quarterly scorecards. In fast-moving environments, market conditions can shift significantly over the course of a year. Waiting 12 months to review progress means missed opportunities. Attention spans matter too: objectives set in January and only revisited in December are easily forgotten. Shorter review cycles, supported by simple scorecards, help keep goals relevant and top of mind. The rituals organisations use to set and review goals work best when they are reinforced by recognition. Credible systems that reward outstanding performance with greater responsibility and compensation send a clear signal about what truly matters. This builds trust and encourages the kind of discretionary effort that turns plans into sustained results. When leaders put the right processes in place, teams can achieve extraordinary results. One final challenge is helping those teams stay grounded in the face of success. High-performers can become intolerant of colleagues they see as less important than themselves, dismissing cautionary input from compliance or expecting special treatment from support functions. Left unchecked, these behaviours quickly become dysfunctional and put the organisation at risk. Leaders can address this by reinforcing respect for others’ roles and contributions. Strategies that work most effectively for this include: role-modelling the humility and acknowledgement that you’d like your team to show; showcasing examples of where subordinates have worked constructively with colleagues in supportive roles; and, sanctioning high-performers whose internal behaviour is disruptive, by giving clear feedback, and if necessary, withholding rewards or even removing them from the team. Trust, ritual, recognition, and groundedness are all practical levers for turning goals into results. As organisations look ahead to 2026, successful execution will depend critically on creating a setting for people to perform. As my old colleague Patrick would say, how far can you go? Christian Sellars is the CEO of Transforming Engagements (TES) Ltd, a Kigali-based consultancy that helps organisations prosper by transforming leadership and culture.
