Why most New Year’s resolutions fail—and what that says about leadership habits

Yes, it’s that time of year again: when we don’t just wrap up one chapter but start anticipating the next, determined to begin with something that resembles a clean slate. The ritual is familiar: a little reflection, a little optimism, and a list of promises to our future selves.

New Year’s resolutions are extremely popular, particularly relative to their low execution rate. According to a recent 2025YouGov survey, 31% of U.S. adults can be expected to set at least one resolution for the new year—with the highest participation among younger adults (under 30), of whom 58% say they will make a resolution.

Saving money emerges as the single most common New Year’s resolution among Americans (26%), followed closely by goals related to health and well-being: 22% plan to improve physical health, 22% want to exercise more, another 22% aim simply to “be happier,” and 20% intend to eat healthier.

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The benefits without the work

New year’s resolutions reveal a painful truth about change, namely: everybody seems to love change, until they have to do it. Indeed, even when people say they want to change, what they actually want is to have changed—in other words, to enjoy the benefits of having changed or having achieved the desired transformation, but without the painful and effortful work of undergoing the process to achieve it.

We are, in essence, creatures of habits, and though every habit was once a new behavior, it is hard to unlearn behavioral patterns and dispositions that have become defining habits. In the famous words of Samuel Johnson, “the chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”

Although New Year’s resolutions may seem like trivial once-a-year occasions, they paint a bleak picture about our capacity to change. Consider that these are typically borne out of a genuine desire to improve ourselves, and are motivated by intrinsic or at least personal motives, rather than people telling us to change or evolve. In theory, this should put us in an ideal position to achieve our goals, since all change is fundamentally the product of our own desire or will to change—that is, the only way to get someone to do something is to get them to want to do something.

Hard to keep

In practice, however, we do a dismal job holding our resolutions and are generally likely to break them and then recycle them in future years. In a longitudinal study of 200 resolvers, 77% had maintained their resolutions after one week, but this dropped to 55% after one month, 43% after three months, 40% at six months, and only 19% still held to them after two years.

Another study provides more reasons for optimism: it tracked 159 people making New Year’s resolutions and 123 similar non-resolvers for six months. Both groups had comparable backgrounds and goals (mainly weight loss, exercise, and smoking cessation), but their outcomes diverged sharply: 46% of resolvers were still successful at six months, compared with just 4% of non-resolvers. Among resolvers, higher self-efficacy, greater readiness to change, and stronger change skills predicted success, and those who succeeded relied more on practical cognitive-behavioral strategies than on emotional or awareness-raising tactics. The authors conclude that New Year’s resolutions offer a valuable natural window into how real behavior change unfolds.

The connection to organizational change

That said, when we look at most organizational change interventions (especially the ubiquitous attempts to develop or “transform” leaders), there are even fewer reasons for optimism. Here’s why:

(1) Leadership change interventions are rarely driven by internal desire.
When organizations ask leaders to change, they usually want them to change in a specific way, aligned with the business agenda. This means the change is externally imposed rather than intrinsically motivated. Unsurprisingly, meta-analytic research shows that intrinsic motivation dramatically increases the success of behavioral change interventions, while externally imposed change often produces compliance without real transformation.

(2) Measurable outcomes or quantifiable metrics are often lacking.
Many leadership development programs still rely on vague perceptions of improvement or on self-reported progress, rather than objective before-and-after data. Organizations often over-index on participation, sentiment surveys, or anecdotal indicators, while ignoring behavioral KPIs or longitudinal performance outcomes. Success becomes conflated with completion, and leaders often receive credit for attending a program rather than actually changing.

(3) Personality often stands in the way of change.
Most leadership behaviors that organizations want leaders to change, such as listening more, dominating less, delegating better, becoming less impulsive, or being more emotionally regulated, are deeply rooted in personality. And personality is highly stable. Leaders don’t micromanage, interrupt, or avoid conflict because they “forgot” how to behave differently; they do so because these tendencies are their psychological defaults. Asking someone to act against their personality is rarely sustainable unless supported by strong motivation, environmental scaffolding, and ongoing reinforcement.

(4) The environment often pushes leaders back to old habits.
Even when leaders make progress, the organizational context often pulls them back. If incentives, culture, role expectations, team dynamics, and senior-leader behaviors remain unchanged, new habits cannot survive. A leader may return from a development program eager to delegate more, only to find that the culture rewards heroic overwork, rapid responsiveness, and “being in control.” In such contexts, reversion to old habits is almost guaranteed.

What works

And yet, well-designed leadership development interventions do work, typically yielding average improvements of around 30% for approximately 30% of leaders. Crucially, they tend to share certain characteristics:

(1) They are enhanced and supported by a coach.
Coaching meta-analyses show significant positive effects on behavioral change, goal attainment, and leadership effectiveness. Coaches help leaders translate insight into action, apply new behaviors in context, and stay accountable.

(2) They rely on high-quality, evidence-based coaching and expert change professionals.
The expertise of the coach matters. Effective coaches draw on validated psychological frameworks, provide accurate diagnosis, challenge constructively, and avoid the vague platitudes common in low-quality coaching.

(3) They ensure the organizational context and incentives align with the change expected.
If new behaviors are not reinforced (or worse, if the organization rewards the opposite behaviors) change will not stick. Structural alignment (incentives, culture, team expectations) is a critical amplifier.

(4) They leverage the science of behavioral change.
Small habit formation, nudges, friction reduction, implementation intentions, environment design, and regular prompts all increase the likelihood that new behaviors will persist.

(5) Most importantly, they select the right leaders to invest in.
Coachability, which largely boils down to openness to feedback, willingness to self-reflect, humility, and a genuine desire to improve, is one of the strongest predictors of leadership development ROI. Whatever you think of personalities like Trump or Musk, it’s clear they have little appetite for being coached. In contrast, leaders who are curious, self-aware, and eager to grow are far more likely to change.

Viewed through this lens, New Year’s resolutions and leadership development are two versions of the same psychological phenomenon: most people want the outcomes of change without the discomfort of transformation. Leaders, like the rest of human beings, start the year with good intentions, but only a minority translate those intentions into new habits. Perhaps the most important New Year’s resolution for leaders, then, is not to “change everything,” but to commit to the small, unglamorous, sustained behaviors that actually make change possible. After all, lasting leadership growth—like lasting personal change—is less about setting resolutions and more about building habits that survive past January, and perhaps even until the next decade.

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