5 New Year Resolutions Every CEO Should Make in 2026
Exit interviews and engagement surveys won’t fix what’s broken inside your company. In this New Year episode of The Elephant in the Boardroom, co‑CEOs Jeremy Eden and Terri Long share five concrete resolutions CEOs and senior leaders can make to actually change outcomes in 2026.
From fixing “potholes” in your customer journey (like tone‑deaf outreach to someone who has passed away) to aligning incentives so the business acts as one company, they show how small, disciplined changes in leadership behavior can transform customer experience, employee engagement, and performance.
Key Takeaways
Customer journey “potholes” quietly erode trust and are often easy to fix if leaders actually walk the journey.
Big companies struggle to act as one company; misaligned incentives and siloed budgeting create internal friction.
Employees often have the answers, but their ideas are ignored until consultants re‑package them.
Fact‑based decision‑making beats politics, but only if leaders are willing to challenge pocket vetoes and old assumptions.
Keeping people who drive you nuts but don’t drive results demoralizes your best performers and accelerates their exit.
Resolution #1 – Fix the potholes in your customer journey
Leaders see strategy decks. Customers see details: calls, emails, forms, scripts, and hand‑offs. A single insensitive email—like addressing a deceased customer directly—reveals gaps in data, process, and ownership.
Make 2026 the year you:
Walk your own customer journey end‑to‑end
Find the small but painful moments that break trust
Assign clear ownership and fix them for good
Resolution #2 – Make the company act as one company
As organizations grow, divisions, regions, and functions naturally optimize for themselves. Incentives, budgets, and metrics can pit teams against each other.
Commit to:
Designing incentives that reward enterprise outcomes, not just local wins
Surfacing where one team’s success creates friction or cost elsewhere
Making “one company” a strategic and budgeting imperative, not a slogan
Resolution #3 – “They listened to us and acted on our ideas”
Too often, companies bypass their own people and pay consultants to rediscover the same ideas. The better path is “anti‑consultant” first: give employees a clear method to share their insights, then act on them visibly.
In practice:
Run structured, time‑bound efforts to collect ideas from people closest to the work
Prioritize, implement, and communicate what changed
Aim for employees to be able to say: “They listened to us and acted on our ideas.”
Resolution #4 – Care more about facts, less about politics
Senior experience matters, but it should not override evidence. Pocket vetoes like “I’m against it” can quietly kill good ideas without ever testing them.
Build habits where:
Leaders ask, “What facts are we using? How current are they?”
Assumptions from past roles or markets are challenged, not worshipped
Opinion and experience guide where to look—but facts decide what to do
Resolution #5 – Replace people who drive you nuts but don’t drive you forward
Every organization has people who create friction, drama, or resistance without adding enough value. Keeping them, especially in senior roles, sends a clear message to your best people.
This year, resolve to:
Identify roles and individuals who consistently block progress or drain energy
Offer fair coaching and clear expectations—but make decisions when change doesn’t happen
Protect your best performers from carrying the weight of chronic issues
Practical Steps You Can Implement This Quarter
Map one core customer journey and repair the biggest potholes.
Review incentives and budgeting to spot misalignment between divisions.
Launch an internal “anti‑consultant” initiative: collect employee ideas and implement a few quickly.
Audit a handful of major decisions: were they driven by facts or politics?
Make one tough personnel decision that signals what you truly value.
Chapter Guide
00:00 New Year intro and pause announcement
01:07 Resolution #1 – Fix customer journey potholes
02:33 Resolution #2 – Act as one company
03:40 Resolution #3 – “They listened and acted on our ideas”
04:25 Resolution #4 – Facts over politics
05:29 Resolution #5 – Replace people who drive you nuts
06:17 Closing and what’s next
FAQs
Are these resolutions only for CEOs?
No. Any senior leader or business unit head can apply them inside their span of control.
How do I start fixing customer journey potholes?
Pick one core journey, experience it as a customer, and log every confusing, frustrating, or insensitive moment. Then assign owners and deadlines to fix the top few.
What if politics is deeply embedded in our culture?
Start small. Introduce fact‑driven challenges in one decision process, model the behavior yourself, and celebrate examples where facts changed minds.
Episode Transcript:
Happy New Year, Jeremy. Can you believe it?
I cannot. Another year in the books, another exciting year to look forward to. So we just want to tell our listeners that we are going to be putting the podcast on pause briefly while we get ready for the launch of our new business. And you should expect all to hear from us about it in the weeks to come. Yeah.
So exciting stuff. Very mysterious.
Yes. In the interim, we always like to leave the year by giving our favorite resolutions that a CEO or other key decision maker might make to themselves for themselves. So here are the our five favorites for this year.
And if you aren't a CEO, feel free to, you know, send them a link to this. I mean, okay, number one, we will fix the potholes in our customer's journey. We occasionally do something we call gaffes that make us laugh. And one we haven't done is when I experienced personally with H and R Block. My cousin passed away a couple years ago now and I had been doing prior to her passing away, doing her taxes. And of course when someone passes away, you file a final return and you know the IRS knows this person is deceased. That's a box you check. And H and R Block knew it.
Yet I still continued to get calls from them saying, hi, is this Barbara, my cousin's name? No, it is not. And I got emails Dear Barb, I mean all the time. So they were great in many ways. That's a pothole that could be fixed.
Yes. So the second resolution is we will institute new ways to make sure we truly act as one company. And the bigger the company gets, the worse it is, the harder it is to act as one company. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, was describing the various divisions of Apple. But he put after the word divisions. Even the word is ominous. And incentives are often not aligned. How many times in the budget process is one area of the company fighting for something different to make its bonuses, but that just hurts another? How often do people areas of company not even know what impact they're having in terms of cost or friction or Difficulties in other areas.
So making working as one company a strategic imperative, a tactical imperative, a budgeting imperative, is an important resolution in our opinion.
Okay, number three, at the end of this year, 2026, our employees will say they listened to us and they acted on our ideas. One point we like to make here is about the importance of listening to your employees as opposed to just assuming they don't have answers and bringing in consultants who will take their ideas and repackage them as their own. So think anti consultant in 2026. First give your people the method, the process, the voice to tell you their ideas and then for the love of God, act on them.
Yeah. The fourth one is when we make decisions, we're going to care more about facts and less about politics. Now, these are very easy words to say. Everyone will say, yes, of course, but the actual dynamic day to day is it's very hard when someone has been in the company 20 years, is very senior, highly experienced, and just essentially vetoes something by saying, I'm against it. What we call the pocket veto and not being challenged. Not in a culture where they can be challenged about, well, why? How do you know what you're saying is true? How can we show what the facts are? Maybe you're using old experiences and old facts, so making sure that use facts rather than opinions. And of course, we love the quote made famous, I guess, by senior senator Dana Patrick Moynihan, but very widely used now. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.
Yep, used that a lot with my children growing up. Okay, fifth and final resolution. We will replace the people who drive us nuts, but don't drive us forward. And I might even change this a little bit to say replace the people that drive you nuts, even if they do maybe drive you forward a little bit. But in any case, nothing will make your high performers leave faster than being forced to pick up the slack from the people who don't hold, you know, carry their weight. So, you know, it's hard to do, but it will help you in the end.
Agreed. And so on that note, happy new Year, everyone and we'll let you know when we resume with our news.
Bye bye.
Thanks for listening. To learn how Harvest earnings helps large companies overcome the bad practices, Visit our website harvesternings.com or email us at infoarvesternings.com.
Also, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a rating and a review. It really helps others discover the show. Until next time, I'm Terri Long, and I'm Jeremy Eden.