December's double whammy: end-of-year fatigue meets the party season
Carlie Belancic can help. Prep for next year starts now
Know this feeling? You’re trying to wind down for the year, but at the same time you’re ramping up for Christmas. There’s the school assemblies, family expectations building, the end-of-year catch-ups and, if you’re “lucky” enough, birthday party invites proliferating on the fridge. Then maybe there’s an unspoken pressure at work that everything must be “neatly tied away” before the calendar flips.
Carlie Belancic. Picture by Sarah Mann at The Mann Project Media
For Carlie Belancic, a psychologist and founder of consultancy The Happiness Lab in Wollongong, it’s also when leadership comes to the forefront.
“This is a time of year when people experience end-of-year fatigue, whether it’s psychological or environmental or a little bit of both,” she says. “It’s something that people experience, and it’s rife, and it seems to be getting bigger every year.”
The catch is that December’s challenges can’t be solved in December alone.
Leadership as a year-round discipline
Carlie frames effective management through what she calls “leadership fitness”, aligning leadership skills to physical fitness.
“Your leadership skills are not set and forget,” she explained. “You need to work not only to build those skills, but to maintain them. Once you build them, they will disappear if you don’t work at developing and maintaining them over time.”
This philosophy matters as some leaders find themselves in management roles not through leadership training, but rather through technical excellence. In these instances, Carlie challenges the concept of promotion as it downplays the specific skills leadership demands.
It’s a different skill set because fundamentally, leadership isn’t all about the work, it’s about people. And people, as she said, are “beautifully complex”.
The piggy bank principle
At the heart of Carlie’s approach is a deceptively simple metaphor: every person on your team carries an imaginary piggy bank, and it’s a leader’s job to make regular “relationship deposits.”
“Inevitably, the day comes when you have to make withdrawals from that piggy bank,” she said. “Whether it’s the end of year and you’re asking someone to do an extra thing, or you’re having a hard conversation, or you have to enforce a change—there are times when you have to make those withdrawals. So making sure that piggy bank is really full is really important.”
The most valuable coins at this time of year? Simply noticing and hearing people.
“If people are telling you they’re tired, showing and demonstrating that you understand that and validating that is a really powerful thing to do,” Carlie said. “When we feel understood, it doesn’t make the pain go away, but it can have a buffering effect.”
This extends to vulnerability, but not the panic-inducing kind, the connecting kind. The old-school leadership model demanded an “always-on” leader while contemporary leadership acknowledges reality. The key distinction is that there’s a difference between acknowledging an emotion and reacting to it. “It’s okay to actually have the emotion, acknowledge that you feel tired, talk to your manager about it, take a break if you need it, and keep going,” she said. “That’s what we would call emotional agility.”
Mental time travel and the wins we forget
As year-end approaches, Carlie advocates for structured reflection during work hours, not as holiday homework. The wins should be celebrated with the same resolve the challenges are analysed.
“We’re really good as human beings at remembering all of the things that have gone wrong and really bad at remembering and reliving and unpacking the things that have gone right.”
“This ‘negativity bias’ means teams forget achievements within months,” she said
Her solution is “mental time travel”. Collectively, go back to January and recognise your accomplishments. “Things that if you told us in January we were going to achieve, we would have thought that was amazing. And now it’s 12 months down the track and we’ve already forgotten.”
The human constant
Looking ahead, Carlie sees relationship skills becoming even more critical as technology handles routine tasks. “Leadership is always going to be a relationship, no matter how much AI or whatever we have,” she said. “That’s going to be a fundamental and very necessary skill for a workplace.”
Her perspective is informed by data. “About 80% of employees report their direct boss significantly impacts their wellbeing.” Given that roughly 40% of life is spent at work, leadership quality isn’t just an organisational concern, it’s a community one.
During a recent trip to Fiji, Carlie watched restaurant staff moving tables with unhurried grace. “They were just moving so slowly, but in a way that wasn’t lazy at all. It felt very measured and mindful,” she said.
“Just because we rush doesn’t mean we’re more productive.”
For Carlie, leadership fitness isn’t about doing more faster. It’s about showing up consistently, making deposits, and remembering that before the spreadsheets and the deliverables and the year-end wrap-ups, there are people - “beautifully complex people” - trying to do their best work.
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