How to Align Your Team Before Year-End: 5 Leadership Moves to Make in October
You may know this pattern too well: once mid-November hits, momentum can dip. Between holidays, vacations, and general year-end fatigue, the window between Thanksgiving and New Year’s can turn into a murky holding pattern.
But it’s only October, which means there’s time to get ahead of this potential pitfall! Now is the time to proactively align your team, clarify priorities, and create energy to carry you through Q4. With a few focused leadership moves, you can head into the end of the year with more alignment, confidence, and renewed productivity.
Here are five practical ways to make it happen:
1. Call Out the Elephant in the Room
Your people are likely aware of the fact that Q4 can be tricky for focus and momentum. Teams may already be feeling a dip in energy as their personal calendars fill up with commitments. (Not to mention, fall vibes can mean a general energetic slowdown if you live somewhere where the seasons shift!)
Sometimes the most fundamental thing you can do is call a spade a spade. Have a proactive conversation with your team about this reality. Share that it’s normal, but you want to get ahead of the season together by focusing on what matters most in these last 60–90 days.
By being transparent, you build trust and give your team a clear framework for how to approach the work ahead. You’re also accepting vs fighting the reality that fewer things might get done. In doing a prioritization exercise, you can get the team oriented around the most important work to accomplish by the end of year.
Pro tip: Commit to a weekly, 10-min alignment check to gauge where your team is at by asking them to answer the following questions:
What’s our #1 priority this week?
How does it connect to our long-term goal?
What’s my role in making it happen?
If you get different answers or see answers start to stray, you’ve got a clarity gap. As a leader, your job is to fix the gap before adding more work so the team has a clear path forward (more on that via #3 and #4 below).
2. Don’t Let the Momentum Stall
So you got your team to huddle on Q4 priorities and now you’re feeling confident about the plan. The whiteboard is full of incredible ideas, your team is excited about the possibilities, and everyone agrees to follow up via email on next steps.
And that, right there, is where things go off the rails.
The final moments of a workshop or meeting are essential for aligning on priorities and outlining some initial next steps while the team is still gathered in the same room.
Here are some basic things you can do to create a tangible plan for what’s next:
Talk about what you learned: Debrief on findings, clarify where you landed, align with the group on what was agreed upon, and evaluate your progress against the brief or problem statement you gathered to work on.
Define next steps: Delegate tasks, define roles and responsibilities, set check-in deadlines, and create specific action items. Again, these wrap-up activities will come in handy if you weren’t able to get to them during the workshop. I love the Horizon’s Method for this step.
Put together a summary to share: It’s important to create a record of the work before everyone turns their attention back to other tasks and forgets about the details of the session, or what needs to happen next. This document can be a great point of reference for team members to jog their memories on decisions made and it’s also an awesome resource to share with stakeholders or other team members who might need insight into your progress.
By completing this important aspect of the work, you’ll create a team that’s empowered and prepared to keep the momentum going so that their good ideas can get off the ground and drive meaningful impact (rather than simply being an idea that was scribed on a whiteboard).
3. Run an Assets & Liabilities Exercise
Assets and liabilities is an exercise I often facilitate with teams to drive a shared understanding of what’s working for and against the team. It’s also an excellent way to take an inventory of all the work the team has done to date, creating shared understanding and alignment.
Here’s how you run this exercise:
Have one person own the whiteboard, writing the words “assets” and “liabilities” at the top with a dividing line drawn vertically between them.
Next, capture the contributions that others share. I like to crowdsource items for the assets column first because they tend to be positive and help maintain an optimistic energy in the room. Ask the group for examples of things that are known strengths, notable efforts or proof points, and anything that’s working or has worked in the past that the team could leverage or learn from.
From there, move on to liabilities; the things that might get in the way, opportunities for growth, what to watch out for, things that could harm the team’s efforts, or things that didn’t work before.
Once you’ve explored both columns, keep the conversation going and bounce back and forth as you build the list. I like to note that something can be both an asset and a liability, and is worth examining from that lens.
At this point, you may see a natural 1:1 ratio across columns, or you may not. That part isn’t as important as getting the team to align on the lists laid before them, and creating a shared understanding for the state of the state.
Laying this foundation is an excellent jumping-off point for the work ahead, so this can be a useful method early in your collaborative session.
Want a free tool to help with this step? Download my Asset Inventory Worksheet so your team has something to work from.
4. Revisit Your Purpose Statement
Taking time in October to reconnect your team to its purpose provides a north star for decision-making and priority-setting.
Even if the organizational purpose is well-defined, there may still be struggle at the team level if people aren’t clear on how their work ladders up to the big picture.
Ask your team to think about their impact on both internal and external stakeholders. Identify the unique attributes that set them apart and the skills and capabilities that make them indispensable.
The purpose statement should hold up over time and be something that is more about the reason the team exists rather than the specific work they do. Start it with “We exist to…” then complete the sentence by leveraging the following inputs.
Who does your team impact, both internally and externally, and how?
What are the unique attributes of your team?
What distinguishes your team from others?
What skills and capabilities does your team possess that no other team has?
This is a great way to create a renewed energy and commitment to the work, especially at the end of the year when folks are distracted, tired, or checked out.
5. Consider a Design Sprint
I know how difficult it can be to clear calendars and get a team on board with a multi-day workshop, but if you have a big initiative lingering on the back burner, Q4 is the perfect time to tackle it with a Design Sprint.
Sprints compress months of work into days, creating both clarity and momentum. It’s a structured way to:
Solve complex problems quickly.
Align stakeholders around a shared vision.
Generate energy that closes out the year strong and carries into the new year.
Create a kind of focus that doesn’t exist in the modern workplace.
Get real-time, actionable customer feedback.
If the thought of running a Design Sprint feels too overwhelming or time-consuming, send me a note. I take a human-centered approach to leading the work, whether facilitating a Design Sprint for your team, or leading you or a small group through a Design Sprint training.
The Bottom Line
Don’t wait until mid-November to realize your team’s alignment is slipping. By using October strategically, you can set the tone for a focused, energized year-end and avoid the dreaded “nothing happens” stretch. Not only will it help you finish the year on a high note, but it will also put you in a great position to start the new year strong.