Leadership Seasons & Rituals

There are six weeks left in 2021, and I am acutely aware of the season change into winter and the warm-but-frantic end of year period with Thanksgiving, December, and the New Year. Many of us are acutely aware of seasonality in our personal lives, with the upcoming holidays as simply one example. Seasonality contrasts summer and the school year if we’re recent college grads or have children. Seasonality is the recognition of the shorter days and longer nights or celebration of yearly rituals.

In addition to our personal lives, seasonality also exists within a professional context. Taking advantage of the right seasons for you is one way to amplify your leadership growth. Here’s how.

1. Be aware of the seasonality within your career

I’m broadly using the term “seasonality” to refer to periods of time, ranging from months to quarters to years, and the intentional transition between them. Think about the different seasons you encounter in your professional life.

Looking at the time scale of weeks / months / quarters, each “season” will have different characteristics, for example:

The quarter close acceleration to hit sales numbers or other key metrics
Important projects with a kick-off, heads-down busy execution, and launch
A busier end of year retail time between Thanksgiving and Christmas (from my U.S.-centric context)
A slower summer time when many people take time off or have the summer Fridays as half-days or entirely off
Your first 30/60/90 days at a new job or getting to know a new boss

Often, high performers will rush to the next demanding season without taking time to pause / rest and evaluate if anything has changed. No rest or pausing can lead to burnout or many years of routine in an unfulfilling job. Acknowledging seasons can help provide a pause for reflection.

Looking at the scale of half-years or years, there are different examples:

Half-yearly or annual performance reviews to look at the feedback and the hoped-for rewards
The exciting period where you’re looking to acquire a new set of skills or learnings
The restless time when you’re ready to move positions, either inside the company or externally
The period of time before a company re-org and dealing with the fall-out of it afterward
A time to consider a sabbatical or explore a completely different career

These career seasons are cyclical and will like repeat through different times of your life. Often it’s hard to see that you’re in a season unless you look back at patterns of your career.

2. Fighting against a season’s nature can be energy draining

Seasons, and your experience of them, intrinsically have their nature. When it’s monsoon season in the tropics, I want to cozy up indoors and have long conversations with friends. When it gets darker at night, I want to nest and cook warming stews and roast vegetables. When summer comes, I get an itch to travel far.

Yet, many of us in a professional context will fight against a season’s nature.

If it’s your first 30/60/90 days at a new job, you’re expected to be the new person and not know how things work. Yet so often, we want to come in and quickly prove ourselves as the expert. Trying to establish yourself as an expert can backfire, setting us up with an unlikeable know-it-all reputation and potentially sour relationships that haven’t had enough time for trust to flourish
After returning to work postpartum, many working parents want to be their same professional self without acknowledging the burden of raging hormones or the need to pump breast milk (for biological mothers), or the haze and fatigue from sleepless nights with a baby.
Performance review season is often an unwanted burden. We try to complete all our regular work at the same business-as-usual pace while simultaneously shifting to a reflective state of mind to consider our own self-reviews and reflect on how our team has done. Managers shift into combat mode to rally promotions and bonuses for their teams while continuing to execute the daily tasks. This context shifting is draining.

Finally, the nature of seasons is change. You might have been in the same job for years, and it’s now feeling boring or you have no opportunity for advancement. You might have been running through years of grind and hard work with meagre long weekends or 5-day vacations to see you through. There’s nothing wrong with you if you feel like something is missing or you want to change. This change is the normal rhythm of seasons.

3. Celebrate the seasons with rituals

After that doom-and-gloom view of seasons, you might wonder what we can do about the seasons of our professional life. My advice is not to fight against seasonality but to name it and embrace it wholeheartedly with rituals that celebrate the passage of time and changing of seasons.

Rituals make magic out of the everyday and sanctify it into something worth remembering and acknowledging. Think about how you might celebrate some of the professional seasons named above that resonate with you. Some things to consider are:

At the end of each week, celebrate what matters to you and your team. It could be the wins or shout-outs to team members. It could be the top customer insights or the biggest mistakes.
Prepare for performance review season by clearing your regular calendar and kicking it off with a ritual that acknowledges how much you care about feedback and continuous learning for the team. Close the review season with a group ceremony. Continue this ceremony into the 1–1 feedback sessions.
Tie off-sites to the personal seasons. Consider volunteering at a food bank as a team around the holidays.
Take the time to do quarterly or half-yearly futurecasting sessions to imagine where the team or company is going. Kick these off with a celebration of the everyday execution and a ritual to signify that the coming workshop days are different — we’re going to think about impossible dreams.

These are examples of possible rituals around work seasons. Some of these will sound ludicrous, while others may resonate. Which ones do you want to try?

4. Experiment with Seasons & Rituals

I’m entering the third year running my own business. I’ve learned that there is a rhythm of when people seek out coaching, when corporations plan for workshops, how conferences & speaking engagements work, and when to launch books. Most of all, I’ve learned that I need to build in my seasons of rest.

Some of the rituals that I keep are:

A weekly mastermind with a group of three other coaches where we actively share our success that week
A monthly meeting of design leaders turned coaches & consultants where we celebrate our sense of connection
I create an intention word and North Star as a theme for my year. My word for 2021 was whitespace, and it’s tied to pacing myself as an entrepreneur and launching my first book, Make Space to Lead.

The new ones that I will try for next year are:

Block out the weeks and months of the year when I travel with my family and seek my solo retreats for personal growth.
Map out my group programs and retreats. Genuinely understanding the time it takes to share about them, both before and after the session dates.
And more to come!

Finally, as the New Year approaches, if you want to experiment with seasons and rituals, I’m offering support to discover your Leadership North Star in a 6-week program to explore and set your 2022 roadmap.

Bottom-Line

Which seasons in your professional life are important for you to name? Which ones have you been ignoring for too long? How might you actively celebrate and add rituals to mark the transition between seasons?

Advance your leadership by 1. Naming the seasons that matter in your career, 2. Work with the energy of a season, 3. Celebrate the seasons with rituals, and 4. Keep experimenting.

Tutti TaygerlyNovember 18, 2021