The Review Every Leader Skips
As the new financial year gets underway, thousands of SMB leaders across Britain will sit down with their accountants and go through the numbers. Revenue, costs, margins, tax liability. They'll look at what the business did this year and start thinking about what it needs to do next.
They'll scrutinise every line on the P&L. Challenge every cost. Ask hard questions about underperforming products, slow-paying clients, and whether the marketing spend actually delivered anything.
What they won't do is apply even a fraction of that rigour to themselves.
The Review Nobody Does
Every business gets an annual review. Most employees get some form of appraisal, even a half-hearted one. But the person whose performance has the single greatest impact on the business - the MD, the CEO, the founder - gets nothing. No structured review; no honest assessment; no external perspective on what's working and what isn't.
If you ran your business the way most leaders manage their own development, you'd likely be in serious trouble within a year. No targets, no measurement, no accountability, no plan. And yet leaders who would never tolerate that lack of discipline in their teams accept it completely when it comes to themselves.
Seven Questions Worth More Than Your Tax Return
Take thirty minutes and answer these honestly - not the version you'd give at a networking event, the real one.
Where did I add the most value this year? Think about where your involvement actually made a measurable difference, rather than where you spent the most time. If you struggle to answer that specifically, it tells you something important about how you've been spending your days.
Where did I get in the way? Every leader has areas where their involvement slows things down rather than speeds them up. Where did your need for control, your perfectionism or your reluctance to delegate cost the business time, money or talent this year?
What decision did I avoid? You know the one... the restructure you should have done in Q2; the client you should have fired; the hire you should have made; the conversation you kept putting off. What did avoiding that decision actually cost?
What did I learn? And I mean learn in the real sense - what changed how you lead? If the answer is "not much", you've been coasting. Leaders who coast run businesses that drift.
Who challenged me? If nobody pushed back on your thinking this year, either you're surrounded by the wrong people or you've built a culture where challenge isn't welcome. Both are worth looking at.
Am I more capable now than I was twelve months ago? Be honest with yourself. Can you do things now that you couldn't do then? Handle situations better, make decisions faster, lead with more clarity?
What would my team say about my leadership this year - to each other, not to your face? If you really don't know the answer, that's a problem in itself.
The Gap Between What You Review and What Matters
Here's the thing about your P&L: it tells you what happened but it doesn't tell you why, and in most SMBs, the "why" behind the numbers comes back to leadership.
Revenue grew 8% instead of the 15% you planned? That's almost always a leadership issue - either the strategy wasn't clear enough, the team wasn't empowered enough or decisions weren't made quickly enough.
Margins slipped? It might be pricing or operations, but more often it's a leader who didn't address an inefficiency because the conversation felt too difficult.
Staff turnover increased? Rarely about money and almost always about management.
You can't improve the numbers without improving the leadership. And you can't improve the leadership without reviewing it with the same honesty and discipline you apply to everything else.
What a Proper Leadership Review Looks Like
A proper review isn't something you do on your own. You need external perspective, people who will tell you the truth rather than what you want to hear, and a framework that goes beyond gut feeling into structured assessment.
On LEAD™, we build this into the programme. Participants regularly assess their own leadership, receive feedback from peers who know their businesses intimately, and are held accountable for the changes they commit to making. It's not always comfortable - it's not supposed to be. But it does work.
The leaders who do this consistently, who treat their own development with the same seriousness they treat their financials, are the ones whose businesses keep outperforming year after year.
The Review that Moves the Needle
You're going to review the numbers - you should. But don't stop there. Take half an hour and review the thing that drives those numbers more than anything else: your leadership.
If you want help doing that properly, we've put together a self-assessment tool that walks you through the key questions. Or if you'd prefer a conversation about where you are and what might help, we're always happy to talk.
The best time to invest in your development was at the start of your financial year. The good news is, you're right at the beginning of one.
If you'd like to meet to talk about how LEAD™ could help you, please get in touch with us here.
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