There’s a moment every December, usually sometime between the final sales push and the holiday closure, when the pace finally breaks. By now, you should be very close to or in the midst of this moment. Phones quiet down. The calendar opens up. The pressure you’ve carried on your shoulders for eleven straight months begins to loosen its grip. And for the first time in a long time, you can hear yourself think. 

Most dealer principals and senior leaders I work with experience this moment with a mix of relief and unease. Relief because the grind of the year is finally easing. Unease because, once the noise fades, you’re left with questions you didn’t have time to ask during the rush:  

• How am I really showing up as a leader? 
• How is my team doing…really doing? 
• Did I build the habits this year that make leadership easier, or did I spend too much time in firefighting mode? 
• Am I proud of how I coached and developed people? 
• Do I have the energy I need for what’s coming in 2026?  

December is the one month of the year when you’re permitted to ask these questions without guilt. It’s not about slowing down for the sake of slowing down. It’s about preparing yourself to speed up again, with intention. Because leading a dealership, an OEM region, or even a single branch isn’t just a job. It’s a responsibility that requires clarity, energy, and emotional bandwidth. And those things don’t replenish themselves. 

This is the leadership reset. And whether you manage five branches or fifty, the reset begins with honesty.

 

The Habits That Carried You (and the Ones That Didn’t) 

Leadership, at its core, is a series of habits. Not the big, dramatic decisions or acts of heroism. The small, everyday behaviours that shape what your people experience from you. Most leaders don’t recognize how profoundly these habits define a team’s success. 

• The days you walked the shop and asked a tech how their week was going…
• The days you skipped the walk because you were buried in email… 
  The 1:1s where you gave your full attention…
• The ones where your mind was somewhere else…
• The tough conversation you leaned into…
• The one you avoided because you were too tired to deal with it… 

These moments add up. They create the culture your people work in. 

December is the season when you need to pause long enough to look back and say, “What habits helped me lead well this year? And which ones quietly undermined my best intentions?” 

It’s not about judgment. It’s about awareness. And awareness is the first step toward change. 

Mindset: The Emotional Temperature of a Leadership Team 

When I sit down with dealer principals, I often ask, “What mindset did you spend most of the year operating from?” Not the mindset you wanted, but the mindset you lived. 

This is where leaders get quiet. 

Because the truth is, dealership leadership carries a weight that most people never see: uneven markets, relentless OEM expectations, technician shortages, complex budgets, aging facilities, shifting customer expectations. It’s enough to push even the strongest leaders into survival mode. 

But survival mode has a cost. 

When leaders carry stress for too long, the whole organization feels it. Communication tightens—innovation stalls. Decisions become reactive. Teams get cautious instead of creative. 

And leaders begin telling themselves stories like: 

• “I don’t have time to coach right now.”
• “I’ll get back to the development stuff after year-end.”
• “I just need to push through the next few weeks.” 

But here’s the paradox of leadership: Your team takes its emotional cues from you long before it takes direction from you.  

If you want 2026 to be a year grounded in confidence, clarity, and performance—not exhaustion—you have to reset your own mindset first.  That’s not a weakness. That’s leadership maturity. 

 

Coaching: The Leadership Skill That Changes Everything 

Some leaders think coaching is something you do once the fires are out. Or it’s a punitive response to underperformance. But in dealerships, where margins depend on technician efficiency, parts accuracy, sales consistency, and customer experience, coaching is not a luxury. 

It’s the job. 

The conversations where you help someone think differently. The questions that broaden their perspective. The moments when you hold someone accountable not out of frustration, but out of belief in their potential. 

Those are the interactions people remember and those are the interactions that build a bench for the future. 

When I look ahead to 2026, I can say with absolute confidence that the dealerships that will thrive are those where leaders coach consistently, not reactively. 

If you didn’t coach as often as you’d hoped this year, that’s not a failure. It’s feedback. A signal that your leadership rhythms need a reset. And now is the perfect time to permit yourself to rebuild those rhythms. 

 

Accountability: The Most Supportive Gift a Leader Can Give 

When accountability is done well, it’s never about pressure. It’s about partnership. 

People want to know where they stand. They want clarity. They want to contribute and feel valued for doing so.  But accountability only works when it is grounded in trust and consistency. 

Many leaders tell me that accountability conversations became harder as the year progressed, not because they didn’t know what needed to be said, but because they were too drained to say it well. 

And here’s something leaders rarely admit out loud: avoiding accountability is often a sign of leadership fatigue, not leadership failure. 

Which brings us to the most overlooked element of effective leadership… self-care. 

 

Self-Care: The Capacity Engine Behind Great Leadership 

Here’s the part leaders rarely talk about, but everyone feels. You cannot drive high performance from low energy. 

Dealership leadership demands more than strategy. It requires emotional stamina. It demands clarity of thought. It demands the ability to show up—day after day—with steadiness, presence, and belief in the people who follow you. And somewhere around late October or November, that reservoir starts running low for most leaders. 

This is why self-care matters, not as a wellness slogan, but as a leadership requirement. 

And if December gives leaders anything, it’s an opening. A chance to rebuild their capacity before 2026 begins. A moment to do three things that restore the physical, mental, and emotional energy that leadership draws from all year long. 

Over the next three weeks, these three reset practices can make a profound difference: 

 

1. Move Your Body: Rebuild the Energy That Leadership Consumes

Leadership lives in the mind, but the body powers it. 

Most dealer principals spend the year sitting in boardrooms, branch offices, on long drives, and late nights at the computer reviewing financials. The body holds onto that tension, and by December, most leaders are unknowingly operating in a state of chronic fatigue. 

You don’t need a fitness transformation. You need movement. Purposeful, restorative movement. 

This could be as simple as: 

• A 20–30 minute morning walk. No headphones, no calls. Just breath and rhythm. 
• Three days a week for the next three weeks of light strength training or cycling. 
• A stretching or mobility routine just before bed that undoes a year of sitting. 

The goal isn’t performance. The goal is circulation, clarity, and the physical reset your nervous system has been begging for. 

Leaders who enter January with physical energy enter it with strategic energy. The two are inseparable.
 

2. Create Space to Think: Reflect on the Decisions That Defined 2025

Most leaders don’t suffer from a shortage of ideas; they suffer from a shortage of thinking time. 

The year is full of decisions made in motion: staffing, budgets, fleet management, operational priorities, capital planning, service backlogs, and OEM requirements. It’s rare for a leader to have uninterrupted time to reflect on what actually happened and how it shaped the organization. 

December is the one time of year to pause, look back, and ask yourself the questions that matter: 

• What decisions did I make this year that had a positive impact? 

• Where did I hesitate, avoid, or react instead of intentionally leading? 

• What did I learn about myself as a leader? 

• What trends did I notice—about my team, my culture, or my own leadership—that I need to carry into 2026? 

• What decisions would I make differently if I had the year to do over? 

This isn’t about reliving mistakes. It’s about extracting the wisdom the year tried to teach you. 

Book 90 minutes next week. Sit somewhere quiet, maybe your office, before the day starts, maybe a coffee shop, maybe at home after the kids go to bed. Bring a notebook. Let your mind wander through the year. 

Reflection is not indulgent. It is the raw material of better leadership decisions in 2026. 

 

3. Do Something Joyful: Reconnect With the Part of You That Isn’t a Title

I think this is the most essential reset of all. 

Leadership often compresses people into roles: dealer principal, general manager, vice president, regional director. And in the grind of the year, the human behind the title can disappear. 

You spend so much time being responsible that you forget to be joyful. 

So, in the next three weeks, do something purely fun. Something with no productivity value, no strategic angle, no tie to the business at all. 

• Go skiing with your kids.
• Watch a classic holiday movie you’ve seen 20 times.
• Go to a concert. 
  Take your spouse out for a night where you don’t talk about work. Hold their hand.  
• Build something in the garage.
• Read fiction.
• Laugh. Be silly. Let go. 

Joy isn’t the opposite of leadership stress. It’s the antidote to it. 

Fun reopens emotional bandwidth. It reconnects leaders to creativity. It reminds your brain that life is bigger than KPIs and P&Ls. And when leaders show up in January with a spirit that’s light instead of numb, teams can feel the difference immediately. 

 The Reset Begins Now 

Over the next three weeks, these aren’t self-care hacks. They’re investments: 

• Movement rebuilds your physical foundation. 
• Reflection rebuilds your mental foundation. 
• Joy rebuilds your emotional foundation. 

Together, they restore the only instrument through which leadership happens: you. 

Leadership is not sustainable without recovery. And the quiet of December offers every leader a rare opportunity to pause, reset, and return in January with the clarity and energy their teams deserve.