For Auld Lang Syne: Reflections on the Fiscal New Year

Joe Gacioch
May 26
5 min read

For those of us in local government, the end of May and the month of June rarely feel like the beginning of summer. To me, it has always felt like a professional New Years.

When you operate on a fiscal year, the fiscal new year becomes deeply ingrained in how you think, lead, and reflect. It shares many of the same elements as our calendar new year: a time to pause, assess progress, set intentions, to come together, and to prepare for what comes next. It is an opportunity to think aspirational rather than from a place of scarcity. It is a chance to establish accountability, reconnect teams to purpose, and importantly, to celebrate.

The pace of local government often pushes us toward immediacy. Budgets, meetings, resident concerns, infrastructure failures, emergencies, and political transitions rarely slow down long enough for reflection. But the fiscal year transition gives us a natural opportunity to step back and ask a few important questions:

What progress did we make?
What did we learn and how did we grow?
Where are we drifting?
And how might we build next fiscal year?

Reflection Should Be More Than a Checklist

For many organizations, fiscal year-end coincides with annual performance evaluations and departmental reviews. Too often, however, these conversations become transactional exercises designed simply to “close out the year” or give justifications for pay adjustments/non-adjustments.

That approach misses the point entirely. These conversations must originate from and resonate with the self.

A productive performance plan should reflect individual goals that align with team needs and organizational strategy. It should create clarity around how individual contributions connect to broader strategic initiatives adopted by the governing body and leadership team.

Many local government professionals feel over-capacity right now. Staffing shortages, increasing service demands, and operational complexity can create a tendency to rush through performance conversations simply to move on to the next task. But leadership requires us to treat these discussions with greater care and respect.

Performance planning should never feel like paperwork. It should feel like investment through authentic reflection.

Goal Setting Begins at the Beginning of the Fiscal Year

An effective performance plan is not something created at year-end. It should be contemplated at the beginning of the fiscal year as a co-created effort between management and the employee.

The strongest goal-setting conversations often follow a funnel approach:

Organizational objectives → Department contributions → Individual action plans

When done well, employees understand not only what they are responsible for, but why their work matters within the broader mission of the organization. These conversations should also create space for employees to discuss:

Professional development needs
Resource gaps
Career interests
Leadership aspirations
Areas where additional support is needed

This is where succession planning becomes a real system—not as an abstract organizational chart exercise, but as an intentional conversation about people, growth, and future capacity needs.

Ideally, there is alignment between employee development interests and the long-term needs of the organization. And when there is not, clarity itself still has value. Employees deserve to understand where opportunities exist and how they can grow.

Measuring Intentions Against Actions

The fiscal year-end conversation becomes a moment to measure our intentions against our actions.

Some employees genuinely look forward to these discussions because they provide recognition, clarity, and direction. Others may approach them cautiously depending on prior organizational culture or past experiences. Either way, leadership should view these meetings as strategic opportunities—not administrative obligations. Over time, enough intentional and authentic conversations like these begin to shape a culture grounded in integrity, trust, and shared accountability.

These conversations are springboards into the next fiscal year. They help ensure that when strategic planning and goal setting return in the fall, teams are not starting from scratch. Instead, they are building year over year coherence.

Celebrating Purpose and Impact

We gather on New Year’s Eve to celebrate what we have, reflect on what we endured, and look forward to what may come next.

The fiscal new year deserves a similar moment.

After completing individual and departmental conversations, I have always found value in bringing leadership teams together for a broader “State of the Organization” discussion. These moments create an opportunity to reconnect teams to purpose and impact. Local government is fundamentally mission-driven work. At one of these State of the Org presentations, I reminded our team:

“Every day, what we do and how we show up matters to the people who have a home here; to people just driving through; to people who made the risk to start and grow businesses here. Every day we agree to take care of them.”

That is the work. And year-end conversations should intentionally connect employee and departmental contributions back to that purpose.

Recognizing the Small Wins

The year is rarely all roses.

Local governments are navigating significant uncertainty right now: economic volatility, social polarization, infrastructure strain, workforce challenges, and the disruptive implications of artificial intelligence. AI alone is reshaping industries, institutions, and public expectations rapidly enough that it became a central theme in the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV.

Yet amidst disruption, there is also an opportunity to return to basics.

Purpose. Service. Impact.

It can be easy to overlook the significance of small wins because they recur so frequently:

• A Department of Public Services forestry crew clearing storm-felled trees before the morning commute

• A City Clerk helping a new resident navigate voter registration smoothly

• Incremental progress toward cleaning up a nuisance property after months of relationship building and negotiation

• A suppression crew containing fire damage before greater loss occurs

Individually, these actions may seem small and recognizing them often falls through the cracks.

Collectively, they are the daily expression of our hospitality…our public service.

They are the quiet evidence that local government still matters deeply in people’s everyday lives.

And as we close one fiscal year and begin another, we should be careful not to move forward without acknowledging the significance that local government is still about people agreeing every day to take care of one another through the institutions they share.