Craig Groeschel: Leaders Don’t Wait Until January

Look Back, Plan Ahead: Six Leadership Evaluations That Set Up Your Best Year Yet

As this message is being released in early December 2025, leaders everywhere are beginning to think about the year ahead. If you want to lead wisely, now is the perfect time to reflect on the past year and start preparing for the next one.

However, you do not need to wait until January 1st to make meaningful changes. There is nothing magical about a date on the calendar. Great leaders understand that growth begins the moment they decide to take action.

Personally, I prefer to start early. For example, I often adjust my diet before Christmas rather than waiting for New Year’s resolutions. Why postpone improvement when you can begin today? Starting early creates a mindset of discipline. Instead of saying, I’ll be focused later, you begin practicing the habits that move you forward right now.

The best leaders do not wait for a new year to arrive. They start early, and they start strong.

Before planning the future, take time to look back. This is your opportunity to evaluate the previous year honestly and thoroughly. Review your victories, your setbacks, your successes, your failures, the opportunities you seized, and the opportunities you missed.

Most importantly, tell yourself the truth.

Leaders often fall into the trap of making excuses. They blame circumstances, timing, or external factors. But growth never begins with excuses it begins with honesty. If you want to improve, you must be willing to evaluate your year with complete transparency.

There are six critical areas every leader should examine:

1. Successes
2. Misses
3. Patterns
4. People
5. Priorities
6. Yourself

Let’s explore each one.

1. Evaluate Your Successes

Many leaders celebrate wins and then immediately move on. Smart leaders do something different they stop and ask why the success happened.

Leadership expert Andy Stanley once said:

“If you don’t know why something is working when it is, you won’t know how to fix it when it’s not.”

That insight is incredibly important.

When something succeeds, don’t simply enjoy the result. Study it. Analyze it. Understand it.

Ask questions such as:

• Why did this ministry grow while others struggled?
• Why did this product outperform the others?
• What created the momentum?
• Which decisions contributed to the positive outcome?
• What cultural changes helped improve performance?

If you cannot identify the reasons behind success, you will struggle to reproduce it in the future.

Too often, leaders perform autopsies on failures while neglecting to examine victories. Yet success leaves valuable clues.

For example, in a multi-site church environment, every location may share the same hiring process, training system, values, messages, and operational structure. Yet some campuses grow dramatically while others grow slowly.

Leadership certainly plays a major role, but deeper analysis often reveals additional factors. Team chemistry, community demographics, facility limitations, campus age, organizational structure, and even practical details such as parking availability can significantly impact growth.

The lesson is simple: don’t stop at surface-level explanations.

When you experience success, dig deeper. Study the systems, people, decisions, and disciplines that made it possible. The goal is not simply to celebrate outcomes but to understand the ingredients that produced them.

Remember: success leaves clues for those willing to look.

2. Evaluate Your Misses

Every leader makes mistakes.

You hire the wrong person. Launch the wrong initiative. Misjudge the timing of a project. Trust your instincts, only to discover they were wrong.

Failure itself is not the danger.

The real danger is failing to learn from failure.

A mistake you do not learn from is a mistake you are likely to repeat.

When something goes wrong, ask difficult questions:

• What did we overlook?
• Where were we overconfident?
• Where did ego replace humility?
• What warnings did we ignore?
• What should we do differently next time?

One of the most valuable leadership exercises is conducting a post-failure review.

Consider a situation where a new expansion effort failed. Rather than simply moving on, the leadership team documented more than thirty lessons learned from the experience.

Those lessons became the foundation for future success.

The organizations that improve consistently are not the ones that avoid mistakes. They are the ones that learn from every mistake they make.

Never waste a failure you have already paid for.

Learn from it.

3. Evaluate Patterns

Many leaders focus only on isolated events. Exceptional leaders look for patterns.

A single incident may be random.

Repeated incidents reveal culture.

For example:

• One missed deadline may be understandable.
• Five consecutive missed deadlines reveal a deeper accountability problem.

Patterns reveal what is being tolerated inside the organization.

Over time, small compromises often become cultural norms.

Consider a team that gradually becomes less disciplined with time management. A few extra seconds become a few extra minutes. Eventually, what once seemed insignificant begins affecting organizational effectiveness.

The principle is clear:

What you allow, you endorse.

Or said another way:

What you permit, you promote.

Culture does not drift toward excellence by accident. It drifts toward whatever leaders consistently tolerate.

Take time to identify recurring trends:

• Where are standards slipping?
• What behaviors are becoming normalized?
• Which habits are producing positive outcomes?
• Where are you drifting away from your core values?

Patterns tell the truth about your culture.

Pay attention to them.

4. Evaluate Your People

The future potential of any organization rests on the quality of its people.

You can have a brilliant vision, a solid strategy, and excellent systems, but the wrong leaders can undermine everything.

Conversely, great leaders often turn average plans into extraordinary results.

Take time to evaluate the people around you.

Ask questions such as:

• Who is thriving?
• Who is plateauing?
• Who is disengaging?
• Who is ready for greater responsibility?
• Who needs coaching?
• Who needs encouragement?
• Who needs a difficult conversation?

Strong organizations intentionally develop their people.

They understand that great leaders are rarely found they are built.

As you review the past year, think carefully about every leader on your team. Identify their strengths, challenges, opportunities, and growth potential.

Invest in them.

When leaders grow, organizations grow.