As another year comes to an end, it’s time to pause and reflect on your work and accomplishments. While you make your own reflections, we want to share some of our own.
Today, we are highlighting the Lighthouse posts that resonated most with readers like you this year. Your feedback and engagement showed us which topics provided the most value and insights.
Whether you want a reminder of some of our best lessons and insights, or you missed some of our most popular posts this year, this list is for you.
Here’s the posts our community found most helpful in 2023:
- How To Respond To An Employee Resignation The Right Way
- The Complete Guide To Dealing With Toxic Positivity In The Workplace
- 7 Essential Tips For Effective 1-On-1 Meetings With Your Manager
- The 8 Best Professional Development Goals For Managers
- 6 Questions You Must Ask When You Start Managing A New Team
How to Respond to an Employee Resignation the Right Way
This is one of our newest, popular posts. It provides critical advice on responding professionally when an employee quits your team.
Losing a valued team member is always difficult, and how you handle their resignation makes a big difference. If you handle it well, they’ll leave on positive terms and your remaining team members will see that your care about them is genuine. Meanwhile, if you handle it poorly, it can signal to your team that you are two-faced, or leave a sour cloud over everyone who is disappointed they left.
While resignations are often emotional and can feel difficult for you to hear, we’re equipping you with the knowledge you need to handle any departures with care and empathy.
The Complete Guide to Dealing with Toxic Positivity in Your Workplace
Toxic positivity refers to focusing on positive thinking that goes so far that it completely ignores or hides from real problems. It can take root in work cultures where only optimistic messaging is valued. This false cheerfulness pressures your employees to pretend that there are no issues, which eventually leads to festering problems that seriously are hurting your team and company.
You must prevent toxic positivity, because it damages psychological safety, increases risks of burnout, and hinders innovation. It has to be safe to talk about good and bad things.
Unfortunately, toxic positivity behaviors can be hard to recognize at first.
This popular article equips you with skills to spot toxic positivity and replace unhealthy behaviors with constructive communication. By encouraging critical thinking and tackling problems with empathy, you can transform toxic cultures into open, trusting ones.
For leaders seeking to improve their team dynamics, this comprehensive guide gives you an invaluable roadmap to stop toxic positivity in the workplace.
7 Essential Tips For Effective 1-On-1 Meetings With Your Manager
This classic post continues to be in high demand, because many managers and team memebrs alike struggled in 2023 to have meaningful 1-on-1s with their bosses.
1-on-1 meetings are foundational to building strong working relationships between managers and employees. Yet, despite their great potential, 1-on-1s often fall short in practice. Without structure and intentionality, they are a waste of valuable time. Poorly run 1-on-1s lead to people thinking the meetings aren’t worth it, and miss out on the many benefits you could be experiencing from them.
Common advice (that we share often as well) focuses on the responsibility to have a great 1-on-1 being the job of the manager. However, that doesn’t mean that you, as an employee, are powerless to improve those meetings.
With a few intentional tweaks, you can improve the impact of your one-on-one meetings and influence better habits from your manager in the process. You can learn how to do this with our list of 7 essential tips for having amazing 1 on 1 with your manager.
The 8 Best Professional Development Goals For Managers
Every year, new managers are promoted, and other managers take on new responsibilities. Unfortunately, many companies do not provide enough support nor training resources for your new career path.
Fortunately, blogs like ours are here to help you. In this popular, classic post, we lay out the 8 key areas you should focus on mastering to become a great manager. Even if you’re completely on your own to learn and develop your management and leadership skills, this post can get you on the right path.
We share with you both the areas to focus your efforts on to have the greatest impact, as well as many helpful resources so you learn how to build those skills effectively. Learning these skills will make it easier to succeed with your current team you manage as well as scale yourself as your team grows and you’re rewarded for your management success with promotions and new, challenging projects.
Whether you’re a new manager stepping into a big roll in the New Year, or a rising leader looking for a tune up, this post can help you focus your personal development efforts in the best places.
6 Questions You must ask when You Start Managing a new Team
Managing a new team brings a mix of excitement and stress for any manager. You want to do your best, and start on the right foot.
When you start leadinga new team there is a lot of uncertainty for everyone. If you fail to connect with everyone early on, it can make it much harder to work well with everyone going forward, and impact how effective you can be. That’s why building a strong relationship with everyone from day one is so critical.
To help you start things off the best way possible, we are giving you six high impact questions new leaders should ask their teams. These are perfect to ask in your 1-on-1s, and can help you learn all the most important preferences, priorities, and motivations of those on your team.
If you’re hiring anyone new in early 2024, then this post is a must read for you.
Final Word
We want to thank you for following along on this journey with us this past year. Your support drives us to continue creating content to make you a better manager. Thank you for inspiring us and trusting us with your time and attention.
We are looking forward to continuing to help more leaders grow in 2024. We appreciate all your feedback, suggestions, engagement.
If you want to keep up with our future posts, and get in touch with suggestions for future topics, then subscribe to the Lighthouse blog here.
