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According to numerous accounts, Americans’ New Years resolutions are fairly predictable. Not necessarily in this order, here are the top ten for 2009:

• Stop smoking
• Get Fit
• Lose Weight
• Enjoy Life More
• Quit Drinking
• Get Organized
• Learn Something New
• Get Out of Debt
• Spend more time with Family/Friends
• Help Others

All worthy goals, to be sure – and as anyone in a leadership role knows, it’s important to have a goal. With that in mind, I’d like to suggest some resolutions for leaders to consider in 2010:

• Listen more than you talk
• Lead by example
• Show you value employees by asking for their ideas and input
• Communicate clearly, in plain language
• Say “thank you”

What else should leaders be thinking about as we look toward a new year?

Amazingly enough, it’s mid-November. With the holidays approaching, things are slowing a bit, meaning many of us have a bit more time than we’re used to. What to do with it? Take stock.

What were your key priorities for 2009? How many of them were you able to accomplish? What unforeseen events intervened – either to prevent you from achieving something you’d planned, or to redirect your energies? What are your key priorities for 2010?

Harvard Business Review blogger Tony Chan (also CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of Cue Ball, a venture and early growth equity firm investing in the information media and consumer sectors) recommends that every CEO write an annual memo to the board summarizing the most important lessons learned from the past twelve months as well as the four or five key priorities for the coming year. It’s a great idea for any leader, and could also make an effective exercise for a team meeting.

OK, I’m a little late to the game, but I highly recommend Dan McCarthy’s leadership/management skills quiz, based on the book 100 Things You Need to Know: Best People Practices for Managers & HR.

I’ve been managing people for almost as long as I’ve been managed and I (humble expression here) only got six out of 10 right.

How’d you do?

Years ago, I was one of only two female junior faculty members at a large state university in the South, and often the only female at a given meeting. Invariably, one of the middle-aged white men at the table would look over at me and suggest that I take notes. Although at first I said OK – who can say no to anything during their first few weeks on the job? - pretty quickly it began to irate me (as they said in that part of the south). But I didn’t know what to do.

I debated saying, “You know, I’m junior faculty, not a secretary,” or “I took notes at the last three meetings; who else would like to take a turn?” but feared I’d come off as too uppity. Finally I hit on an idea: I left my pen and notebook back in my office. When the request came, I smiled disarmingly and said, “Oh my goodness, silly me – I didn’t bring pen and paper!” In the silence that followed, I could HEAR them chewing over the alternatives: “This is damned awkward.” “If we ask her to go back to her office and get the pen and paper…” “I could offer to lend her pen and paper but that’s almost worse…” Eventually one of them motioned to one of the others: “Morton, you take notes this time.” BINGO. I never, ever brought a pen and paper to another faculty meeting. [And I never regretted it until (fast forward to my next life) my boss, who I adored, laughed and shook his head as he passed me yet another pen and a sheet of paper and said, "Why don’t you ever have a notebook with you like a normal person?" But that’s another story.]

Why am I telling you this? Because in figuring out how to construct communications that drive behavior it’s important to remember that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Years ago, I worked for a credit card company that almost died. A reputation crisis followed by financial mismanagement led to a dramatic fall in the stock price and a near shutdown by regulators.

During that fall, every day brought a new crisis, and each crisis seemed to demand extensive communication to employees, because (the conventional wisdom went) employees would be upset and fearful and would need context and reassurance quickly. Except I didn’t care.

That fall, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He was given three to six months, fought valiantly, and made it through four. Each day, as I got to work and was given the latest news, I had my own news in mind. “The regulators are setting up onsite.” “We just got a stage four diagnosis.” “Our stock price has fallen another 20 percent.” “We’re stopping chemo.” “The regulators are demanding a capital plan.” “We’re giving up on radiation.” The two stories formed a point-counterpoint in my mind all fall, and although I loved my job and was committed to it, I had no doubt about which story was more important, and which outcome would have a bigger effect on my life.

I’m not saying that communicating with employees isn’t important – it is. But it’s important for us to remember that employees have lives outside of work, and often we don’t know much about them. When communications don’t have the desired effect, we may want to take a step back, and see if there’s something else we should be factoring into the picture.

In a recent (fabulous) blog post about how to get people to change behavior, Peter Bregman wrote about a lion at Disneyworld who is always on the rock where he’s supposed to be, waiting to show himself off to the folks on the train. How do they get him to stay there? The rock is temperature controlled – warm in the winter, cool in the summer, so he WANTS to be there.

Our equation at OgilvyImpact is Know + Feel = Do. Our emphasis is on helping businesses get their employees to do what’s needed to advance the business agenda and strategy, and part of that is figuring out what they need to know and feel to want to take that action.

When we work with employers, we talk about carrots and sticks – incentives toward certain behaviors, and disincentives toward others. We also talk about barriers, and how to remove them, and that’s where Peter’s article comes in.

One of the simplest things you can do as an employer is to remove barriers to the action you’re trying to incent. Sometimes it’s as simple as moving desks closer together, or enabling someone’s phone to dial internationally. Sometimes it’s more complex. But whatever it is, the easier you make it, the more likely it is that it’ll happen.

The metaphors are seemingly irresistible. For every so-called “green shoot” that’s identified as a potential sign of life in the economy, there’s a patch of brown grass, a withered leaf, or a dead sapling.

They may not be as dramatic as the 735 enormous cargo ships anchored off Singapore, but every day employees see signs that the recession is not yet over. For me, it’s the fact that the train station where I park – chock full by 7:25 AM when I started commuting – is now one-third empty at 8:45 AM. For my husband, who drives a couple of hundred miles a week on sales calls, it’s that there’s no traffic – ever (and in northern California, that’s a big change).

To reach employees in these times, it’s important to acknowledge these realities, not pretend they don’t exist. Why not start a meeting by asking employees to identify the signifiers they watch? Drawing a parallel between the signs they watch and the signs the company watches can help employees understand where the company is and what it needs to do – and how they can play a role.

According to the study The Road to an Engaged Workforce, the four areas that most affect employee engagement are reduced role conflict, appropriate training, personal autonomy, and personal power.

Interestingly, as Paul Hebert, managing director at influency consultancy i2i notes, these are all controlled by managers, NOT by employees.

Hebert suggests that employers could save money and increase engagement by focusing not on convincing frontline employees that they’re engaged, but on motivating managers to engage them and rewarding them for doing so. His suggestions include rewarding managers for seeking input, for changing work processes to maximize employee autonomy and power, for prioritizing training, and for communicating openly and frequently with their teams.

It’s a truism in employee communications that employees prefer to receive most information from their direct manager. Why wouldn’t engagement follow the same path?

We all know that layoffs are hardest on those who lose their jobs. We also know they take a toll on survivors (hence the phrase “survivors’ guilt”). Less acknowledged is that they take a toll on the front line managers who conduct them.

A ten-year longitudinal study compared managers who had been directly involved in layoff activities (including handing out warn and layoff notices and selecting those to be laid off) with those who had not.

Among the “hads,” the study found significantly higher levels of job stress, depression, and emotional exhaustion. Three years after having been involved in layoffs, they continued to experience poor health symptoms.

The study observed that tough economic times can make layoffs seem more necessary and thus easier to understand for everyone, but also offered some input on how to mitigate these effects – principally, through fairness and transparency.

Fairness influences employee attitudes and behavior: “Layoffs that are seen as the result of fair and transparent procedures are likely to shield managers from employee hostility or retaliation.” Developing clear rules and procedures, convening a committee of several managers to oversee the process, and spreading responsibility widely can also help.

Layoffs are never easy or pleasant, but studies like this one remind us that good communication practices can lessen the impact on everyone involved.

One of the things I love about my job is that I learn as much from my clients as I teach them – and, like a shark that’s happy as long as he’s got water moving over his gills, I’m happy as long as I’m learning. This week we held a “brand camp” session for a client. Here are five useful things I learned:

1. Providing an agenda and questions ahead of time levels the playing field between introverts and extroverts. Extroverts can think on their feet. Introverts need time to process and prepare before they’ll feel comfortable speaking up.

2. Assigning roles can help you negotiate challenges:

• Ask the naysayer to take notes to keep her focused and minimize interruptions.
• Ask the introvert to read the mission statement or provide a recap from the last meeting.

3. There’s a difference between an objection and an obstacle – they need to be handled differently.

• An objection is a refusal: “I don’t want to do it.”
• An obstacle is a problem that can be solved: “I don’t see how I can get all three projects done with less staff?”

4. When you’re trying to elicit input, repeating the question “And what else?” can take you a long way.

5. Harvey can help you: Whether you think of it as your invisible rabbit or the elephant in the room, if there’s a looming issue, you’re better off naming and acknowledging it (even if you can’t solve it) before trying to get folks to focus on the topic YOU want to discuss.