Year-end leadership review has a particular kind of silence to it. It’s not just the house settling after everyone goes to bed, or the way the neighborhood feels once the holidays pass. It’s the shift I feel as the year comes to a close and I’m able to pause long enough to reflect on what happened and think about what’s next.
I find that on the early morning of January 1 every year. Like years in the past, I got up this January 1 before anyone else to begin cooking pork and sauerkraut for our New Year’s Day meal. I have German ancestry from my mom’s side, and my joke within the family is that this meal is the only time of the year I admit I’m German. While I didn’t enjoy the meal as a child, I’ve grown to love it for many reasons, including that I get to cook it and understand how I’m linked to my past. I get to do that for my family, and now I get to cook that meal for my mother, who spent so many New Year’s Days cooking it for us growing up. Once everything was going in the slow cooker, I slipped into the kind of quiet work you can’t do when the day is loud. This is usually where my year-end leadership review starts, not with big resolutions, but with quiet truth.
I looked at what finances I could close out, what we were still waiting to clear in the account, and I updated a few client engagement notes from the last month as I prepped for a January workshop. January 1 mornings are strange in the best way. Even though I don’t usually make it to midnight, I still get woken up to watch the ball drop, and it’s a good hour before we get the kids down for real. So the next morning, everybody sleeps in, and there’s something steady about being awake on the first day of the year.
For a long time, I used that early-year quiet for a narrow kind of review. It was a personal budget check, a “did we stay on track” inventory, and a mental run-through of what tax time was going to look like once everything got aligned for filing. That review still matters, and it’s still part of the discipline of adult life and leadership. But this year the financial side wasn’t the headline. It was the baseline. That’s what a year-end leadership review is supposed to do. It should show you what’s real.
What surprised me was seeing, in black and white, how my client work and the community I’m part of had exceeded what I thought 2025 would hold. Somewhere in that realization was the first clear signal for 2026. It might be bigger, and better, than I would’ve believed a few days earlier. It wasn’t hype. It was a quiet recognition that my assumptions about capacity and impact were smaller than what the year actually produced. I want that kind of truth to show up in a year-end leadership review, because it keeps me honest about what’s possible.
For years I’ve reviewed my life the way a lot of leaders review a business: goals on one side, results on the other. If the results matched the goals, the year was good. If they didn’t, the year got labeled with softer words that still landed like disappointment. And if I’m honest, in past years I wasn’t very good at closing the gap between disappointment and what I did next. Looking back, I can see how that affected my year-end leadership review more than I wanted to admit.
What I often did instead was shrug it off on the surface while letting the dip quietly set the tone for the next twelve months. I would re-base my next year’s plan from a lowered point because I missed some goals in the year that just ended, so I would adjust my next year’s goals downward. It’s subtle, but you don’t just miss a goal. If you’ve ever found yourself lowering your next target because the last one didn’t land, you know what I mean. I’ve done that more than once in a year-end leadership review, and it’s never helped.
But 2025 didn’t fit that format. It refused to be summarized like a quarterly report, because too much of what mattered happened in places no spreadsheet can measure. The most important shifts weren’t always visible, and the biggest wins didn’t always look like wins while they were happening. The year needed a different kind of accounting. It needed a different year-end leadership review than I’ve done in the past.
2025 was the year I stepped away from my corporate role and went full-time in my business. That sentence reads clean on paper, like a simple milestone you can list and move on from. In fact, it felt like I had confidence in one hand and a lot of uncertainty in the other, and I tried to act like they were the same. The imbalance became more obvious as the year went on. And that imbalance had a way of showing up in my year-end leadership review whether I wanted it to or not.
Going full-time in your own business can sound decisive. Exciting. Definitive. But I’m confident most others out there would say it doesn’t feel that way until you’re living it. It comes with quiet calculations, the kind you do at stoplights, in the shower, and halfway through a conversation with someone you love, because your brain never stops moving, even when you’re trying to sound steady. It’s also the kind of decision that makes you feel two things at once: proud and exposed. Proud because it’s a declaration of belief. Exposed because belief is not a guarantee. If you’ve lived it, you don’t need someone to explain it during a year-end leadership review. You remember it in your body.
I expected the obvious challenges: more uncertainty, higher stakes, more responsibility. I expected the mental challenge that would come with being the person responsible for it. But I did not anticipate the new conversations I would be able to have with my family, especially my kids, and how that would change all of us over the year. There’s a version of leadership that stays at work when you’re working for someone else, and there’s a version that follows you into the kitchen. Those conversations mattered enough that they belong in a year-end leadership review, even if they don’t show up on a spreadsheet.
When you’re building something you own, it doesn’t stay at work either, but for a different reason. In a good way, it becomes part of what your family gets to see and talk about in real time. It shows up in the questions your kids ask and the way they watch you carry pressure. It turns entrepreneurship from an idea into a lived example, with all the mess and meaning that comes with it.
At some point this year, one of my kids asked it the way only kids can, simple, direct, and completely loaded: “So who do you work for now, Daddy?” I remember the pause before I answered, and I remember the little smirk that showed up because the question was honest in a way adults rarely are. The easy answer was, “I work for myself.” The truer answer was, “I work for my clients.” And in my mind I added something I didn’t say out loud: “And you’re watching me do it.” That’s a year-end leadership review moment if there ever was one.
That’s the part of leadership that never shows up in spreadsheets. Even if you’re not the CEO, even if you’re “just” trying to do your job, you’re modeling something for your team and your family. People learn what courage looks like by watching how you carry pressure. You don’t get to opt out of influence. You only get to decide whether you’ll be intentional about it.
Year-End Leadership Review: A Scoreboard or an After-Action Review?
When people do year-end reviews, they typically ask whether they hit their goals. Goals are concrete and measurable, and leaders like things they can measure. That question has value, and it’s not a bad place to start. But it’s not always the most useful question, especially in a year where life and business didn’t cooperate with your plan. Sometimes the better question isn’t about performance. It’s about learning. A good year-end leadership review doesn’t just measure goals. It tells you what you’re becoming.
Year-End Leadership Review: The Question That Changes the Next Year
In military and aviation culture, we don’t rely on verdicts. We rely on after-action reviews, because the purpose isn’t to punish. It’s to improve. You reconstruct what happened, not the version that protects your ego and not the version that wins an argument, but the version that makes the next mission better. That mindset changes everything, because it turns reflection into fuel instead of shame. That’s why my year-end leadership review has shifted. I want it to make the next mission better.
That’s what I needed from 2025: not a verdict, but clarity. I didn’t hit every goal I wrote down in January, and I can say that without dramatizing it. Some goals were too ambitious. Some were vague enough to sound inspiring but not specific enough to drive consistent action. Some were built on hope that hadn’t met reality during a year that asked more from me than I anticipated. That’s the heart of a year-end leadership review for me now. I want clarity I can use.
But when I look back, 2025 was all progress. Not perfect progress, and not linear progress, but progress. I notice it in how I talk about my business and the excitement I hear in my own voice. I notice it when I tell someone what I’m building and I see that excitement show up on their face, too. A year-end leadership review should catch that kind of progress, not dismiss it.
I can also see progress in the secondary benefits, the outcomes I didn’t plan for because I didn’t know to want them yet. This year, I watched my kids absorb entrepreneurship in the most honest way possible, not as a concept and not as a motivational quote, but as real life. They saw that work can be more than a role you fill. It can be something you build. They saw that building takes time, and that time takes discipline.
They also saw something else I didn’t fully appreciate until I lived it. Relationships are not the soft side of leadership. They’re the infrastructure. When you leap into entrepreneurship, you quickly learn who gives you energy and who takes it. You learn what it means to ask for help, what it means to give it, and that most growth happens as you engage in your community. This is the kind of thing a year-end leadership review should capture, because it affects everything else.
I grew a deeper awareness of purpose in 2025. Purpose may feel like an overused word in today’s culture, but I can’t think of a better one for what changes when your work is aligned to who you are. When your work has purpose, you show up differently. You respond differently to setbacks, and you stop interpreting every hard day as proof you’re on the wrong path. That’s the kind of shift a year-end leadership review should make room for.
That steadiness matters when you lead others, whether that’s a crew on a job site, a small department in a professional services firm, or a growing team inside a founder-led business. Your people don’t need you to be perfect. Your people don’t need you to tell them how to do their job (and if they do, you have a people problem). They need you to be clear, consistent, and rooting for them. They can handle uncertainty. What wears them out is reactivity. And if your year-end leadership review doesn’t address reactivity, it’s missing something important.
Most years come with variables you didn’t plan for: unexpected turnover, delays, family needs, health concerns, market shifts, difficult personalities, and strained partnerships that slowly change the air in the room. Sometimes it’s economic pressure on partners or clients caused by factors well outside your control: interest rates, cash flow constraints, or decisions someone else made long before you ever showed up. Other times it’s staffing constraints in a production shop, or internal bottlenecks that spill over into your world no matter how well you run yours. Often leadership is the act of deciding with incomplete information, and just as often it’s having the discipline, or discernment, not to decide because the information is incomplete. That’s a reality worth naming in a year-end leadership review.
If you’re struggling with feeling both gratitude and frustration for 2025, that means you’re paying attention. The same goes for pain. Feeling it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means you’re present. That awareness is strength. It’s not a flaw. A year-end leadership review should make room for that kind of honesty.
Here’s what I think makes the difference going into 2026: whether you treat 2025 like a moral judgment or like usable data. A scoreboard review asks, “Did I win?” An after-action review asks, “What happened, and what do I do with it?” In your year-end leadership review, that second question is the one that changes things.
Year-End Leadership Review: What Have You Been Ignoring?
It also forces you to face what you’ve been ignoring. Between aviation and the military, I’m wired for systems and process, and that’s a strength until it becomes a hiding place. I can get too comfortable with a daily and weekly cadence that works, and miss the opportunity for adjustment before a change of course becomes necessary. I’ve learned that if you wait until the change is obvious, you’re already late. That’s the part I have to put right in the middle of my year-end leadership review.
For others, the ignored area might be health. It might be finances. It might be a relationship you’ve let coast. In business, it’s often one of the leadership essentials people delay because they’re inconvenient: the hard conversation, the accountability you postponed, the process you refused to tighten because “we’ve always done it this way.” Ignored areas rarely feel urgent at first, which is exactly why they’re dangerous. And they show up every time you do a year-end leadership review, whether you admit it or not.
Year-End Leadership Review: Name It Early While It’s Still Small
Ignored areas don’t stay neutral. They compound. By the time many leaders finally address them, the ripple effects are already spreading through the team, and now there’s more to clean up than there needed to be. That puts even more burden on the leader, and it wears people down in the process. The challenge usually isn’t the issue itself. It’s how long it went unaddressed, and how big it feels by the time you finally turn toward it. That’s a pattern a year-end leadership review is supposed to catch early.
Have you ever looked back and said you’re glad you waited so long to deal with a problem? I’m confident most of you reading this would agree that hindsight is perfect, and most of us, including myself, can name something we wish we would have addressed sooner. Let me encourage you here. We rarely regret taking responsible action early, but we will regret how long we let something linger. If your year-end leadership review points to something you’ve been avoiding, it’s doing its job.
If 2026 is going to be better, not just busier, part of the work is naming the ignored area early, while it’s still manageable. Not in a dramatic “overhaul your entire life” way. In a practical way, like handling a small maintenance issue before it becomes a major repair. You don’t need a reinvention. You need a deliberate adjustment. That’s what a year-end leadership review is really for.
There’s a phrase I come back to because it’s plain and true: aim small, miss small. It doesn’t mean play small. It means get precise. It means stop relying on vague intentions and start choosing clear actions that are easy to measure and hard to dodge. If you want a different year, you need a target you can actually see. And a year-end leadership review is where you decide what that target is.
For me, 2026 is about building on what 2025 revealed: that purposeful work changes the way you carry pressure, that relationships are the backbone, not the bonus, and that taking a chance on yourself can create benefits you didn’t even know to put on the list. As my business grows, I want to do that work alongside the leaders and owners around me, the people in the arena trying to build something that outlasts them without costing them everything. The work isn’t just growth. It’s growth with alignment.
It’s tempting at the end of the year to focus on the goals you didn’t hit. But you and your team are much more than missed goals. What habits did you form? Who rose to a challenge? Who became an informal leader among the team? What conversations did you have about the future potential of the company or your people, and where did you lean in a bit more to make a hard decision?
Even with incomplete information, whether it was the right decision or the wrong one, you learned something about how you make decisions under pressure. Those things don’t fit neatly into a KPI, but they matter. They show up in the culture, in trust, and in how your team responds when the next hard moment hits.
You’re not going to love everything that happened last year, but we need to acknowledge it. We need to learn from it and make adjustments, because 2026 depends on it. That’s what a year-end leadership review is really for. Let’s use 2025 as the data, create a very deliberate response for 2026, and see where we end up.