A Christmas Message is not just for Christmas, it’s for Life

What a year! The pressures of volatile economic and political environments have taken a heavy toll on our executives, managers and employees. More than ever before, people are heading off for the holidays in a state of some uncertainty, anxiety and perhaps even exhaustion. It’s been a relentless year, and for many people peering into 2024 is not giving them a sense of respite or confidence.

But Christmas is Christmas and we seem as determined as ever to over-spend and over-eat our way through it. And it’s come just as early as ever. We’ve navigated past Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and have you noticed how your e-mail traffic is already starting to fall away.........?

Unlike our summer holidays where, although things go quieter, we don’t all go away all at the same time (unless of course you’re French or Italian), Christmas is the one time of the year when everyone takes a break. Even those who ‘work’ between Christmas and New Year (it should probably more accurately be described as ‘going in’) will not do anything to move problems or strategies forward – there are simply not enough people around to do anything proactive.

So Christmas is a unique collective psychological moment in time, and as such leaders should be taking advantage of this and exploiting the opportunity to communicate in a very special way with their managers and employees.

Let’s examine what actually happens to us and our people over the Christmas break and analyse the psychological process:

1. We mentally head for the hills

2. We re-connect to our families

3. We talk about our work to people who matter to us

4. We make New Year's resolutions

These 4 steps are crucial enough for individuals, but the great thing about Christmas is that all of us – ourselves and all our managers and employees go on this psychological sojourn at the same time, giving us a unique opportunity for a communication of immense power. Let’s look at each of the 4 steps in turn.

1. We Mentally Head for the Hills

We all make a conscious decision to switch off and not to think about our problems until we’re back in January. We communicate this to our bosses and colleagues, without guilt since its Christmas, and in doing so, we start to give ourselves proper breathing space and a true sense of calm for the first time in…….well for the first time in 12 months. It’s incredibly therapeutic – the sense that, just for a couple of weeks, we’ve done all we can, and perhaps more importantly, that others will stay off our backs for a while, since they are also taking a break.

And so we head for the hills, to the sanctuary of our families, whom we’ve no doubt neglected for……….well for 12 months. And as we head off, we are carrying a sub conscious judgement about our company. Are we heading off basically feeling like we’re winning and that we’re in the right company, or are we heading off feeling like we’ve actually almost had enough and that the company will not ever get it right? The answer to this question is crucial for leaders, since whichever relatively binary state we are in as we head off, it will influence the interactions we have over the holidays, and ultimately influence the decisions we make about how we will be when we return to work in January.

2. We Re-connect to Our Families

We are welcomed back into the bosom of our families, with a sort of armistice on any resentments about our over-work in the past year, because it’s Christmas. We help decorate the tree, we start playing games, we go shopping as a family. It’s sad to say, but not only do we genuinely re-connect with our closest loved ones, we actually re-connect with human beings per se. I don’t mean to imply that our work colleagues and peers are not human, but our corporations are so dominated by pressure on timescales, squeezed resources, over-optimistic expectations of results and the sheer amount of battling we end up doing, that we have probably spent the last 12 months feeling pretty isolated. And so we spend a concentrated amount of time back in relationship with our family – with enough time to salve our guilt, and we are reminded of what is truly important to us. (And it’s not our work!)

2. We Talk About Our Work to People Who Matter to Us

Over the Christmas period we see friends and family that we’ve not seen for…..well 12 months. People we love and people we respect: Uncle George who knows we work in management, but can never remember who for; Cousin Jane who knows we majored in business but thinks we’re an accountant or something; Kevin, our friend from schooldays who always remembers who we work for, but who can never understand why our company is so shit at customer service; and then there’s Donald, the brother-in-law that we tolerate because, although he’s a pillock, he’s married to our sister……..and Donald loves to bait us about the evils of our company and it’s shameless lack of ethics, sustainability and good for the World.

And we find ourselves explaining what we really do; who it is we actually work for and what our company really does. And the interesting thing about our explanations is the degree of defensiveness or advocacy they contain. As we explain who we work for to Uncle George, are we proud of our company, or do we find ourselves condemning? As we explain to Cousin Jane what we actually do, are we proud of where we are in our career, or do we find ourselves feeling like we should be further on? As we explain to our old friend Kevin about our company’s actual customer service experience, are we proud or do we find ourselves defending the indefensible? Luckily we don’t give a shit what Donald thinks, but nevertheless his baiting is annoying, especially if it hits a nerve……….does our company actually add value to the World? Do we really work for a company that makes a difference?

3. We Make New Year's Resolutions

When the festivities and excesses of Christmas Day and Boxing Day are behind us, some of us make almost formal resolutions or set ourselves goals for the coming year. But even if we don’t do this formally or too consciously, we will find ourselves sitting up in bed one morning chatting idly to our partners about our plans, maybe even our dreams, for the year ahead. We might speculate on the kids’ schools or university choices, our potential for holidays, maybe that extension or new kitchen we’ve been planning. Inevitably, these conversations carry an unspoken energy about where we will be in our work.

And this time, when we are back at our most connected and so at our most open (our least defensive), is our partners’ opportunity to re-set the bargain between us – for them to renew their exhortations around our health, the time we spend at home (physically but mainly mentally) and for how long we will continue. Of course if we are still in love with our cause at work, that renewed bargain will not differ very much if at all from the bargain we struck a while ago. But if we are stressed and generally not enjoying work, then their appeals will be progressively more ardent.

And even if we were not / are not consciously thinking about changing job or changing employer, we are mulling as we talk these things through.

And so we return to work………

And we return in January, not in a different psychological state from when we left, but in a greatly heightened, much more self aware state. Our psychological state will be more conscious, more definite, more palpable, more undeniable.

So are we returning with a renewed confidence and commitment to our work, or a new found openness to be attracted away by something better over the fence? Has our re-connection with humanity and our refreshment left us more committed to, or more detached from, our company and our work? It will be one or the other.

And since the state we return in, will almost certainly be the state we left in, Leaders simply cannot leave this to chance! Leaders have to do everything in their power to ensure that employees are heading off in the ‘right’ state of mind.

So how do we do this?

Constructing the perfect Christmas message

Most leaders will issue a Christmas message of some sort – we just need to make sure that our Christmas message prepares our managers and employees for their Christmas contemplation, and leaves them already feeling more valued, more optimistic and more refreshed.

The perfect Christmas message needs to cover 5 points, as follows:

1. Current Situation – an open statement about how things really are as we go into the new year, giving the very latest information we can. This ensures that our employees feel trusted and treated as adults who can take the truth

2. Competitive Advantage – a positive and progressive comparison of how we are genuinely ahead of our competitors. This ensures that our employees have a new chance to realize that the grass might just not be greener….

3. Inherent Strength - a confident statement about our Value Proposition, our genuine USP, our history, or even a key asset (such as a technology or market share) that we possess. This ensures that our employees are reminded that they work for an inherently strong company that they can be proud of and that will win through

4. Opportunities for the Future – an open statement about the opportunities or creative possibilities ahead of us all as we enter the new year, again giving confidence that this is the only place that our employees would want to be

5. Valued Employees – finally a heartfelt and genuine thank you, given with real evidence of the difference that our employees’ phenomenal efforts have made to the company. We truly could not do without them, and although we may not have shown this or expressed this for…….well, 12 months, we certainly want to express it now. This ensures that our employees know they are valued and that what they do makes a real difference and really matters

If we construct our Christmas message along these lines then we not only send our managers and employees away feeling better, more crucially we send them away equipped with energy and information they can use in their conversations with Uncle George, Cousin Jane, our old friend Kevin and even that dickhead Donald.

A Christmas Message is not just for Christmas, it’s for Life

A Warning

All this comes with a health warning however. In order to construct effective Christmas messages, we need to put a huge amount of care into their crafting.

Many hundreds of years ago, as a young CEO running my very first company (of just 80 employees) I wrote my first Christmas message. It was quite short, very open and really heartfelt. However I didn’t feel it was personal enough. After all, with only 80 employees, I knew them all as true individuals and I valued something special in each of them. So I found myself writing 80 individual messages as well. I bought 80 cards, with as Christmassy a theme on the front as possible, but blank on the inside. Then inside, on the left I handwrote my company message – the same message word for word handwritten 80 times! And inside on the right I hand wrote each individual name and then their personalised message.

To this day, this remains one of the most powerful things I ever did as a CEO. But I had started something that I couldn’t back out of. And this was fine until 2 years later when there were now 200 individual cards to write. So I didn’t. As you can imagine the impact of my not doing what I had always done was huge. People wondered what was wrong; whether there was something I was hiding from them; why I didn’t care any more.

So, handle with care. But do not leave it to chance.