Leader Standard Work

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my follow-up methods using Outlook and related parts of the Microsoft Office suite. Those tools work well for day-to-day tasks and following up, but what about the bigger long-term tasks? When you look back at your month or year, did you get done what you wanted? The key for this is "leader standard work".

Inspirations

Much of my "leader standard work" was inspired by work I did at my previous company after a small group of us (EV, GR) read Creating a Lean Culture by David Mann, although I later stumbled into a different concept. We adopted the term "leader standard work" from his book, where it tackled the items that team leaders should be performing on a regular basis. This might include walking the production floor (or office area) to check the associated status boards, daily stand-up meetings, and the like.

The other inspiration came after I had a lot in-place, but reassured me I was on the right track and helped me focus on the right items: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. Newport reminds us that just because we're busy daily doesn't mean that we're getting the long-term things done, and vice-versa. Output in modern office work is often invisible, so we use "am I busy?" as a proxy for "am I producing?", with the result that we're always on the ragged edge of burnout.

The Challenge

For many teams, they meet at the end of a year (or the beginning of a new year) and lay out their team annual goals and objectives and often a "macro plan" that identifies the tasks that will support those goals. Many of those teams then complete the plan, charge out of the meeting room ready to face the year, and promptly forget about the macro plan. Once or twice that year, they'll assess their progress towards their annual goals, say "Oh, right, I was supposed to do that", and very little happens. And the cycle begins anew.

When we presented our first Mann-inspired drafts to leadership in a mostly-virtual environment, we received pushback: with people's days managed by their Outlook calendars, why did they need another form to fill out daily? That made us change focus from daily tasks to those annual tasks "macro plan" tasks to improve our chances of completing them.

The Method

Although I built an Excel tool to manage my leader standard work (because of course I did), Excel isn't necessary for this. It consists of three sheets: annual, monthly, and archive.

Annual

The annual sheet is where the user lays out their annual goals and objectives. In my case, I divided it into my individual goals (5-10 items), any macro plan items I was assigned (which might by team goals but not reflected in my goals), and individual development plan items (i.e. career advancement tasks). These were written down the left side of the sheet. Across the top were the months January through December.

Task	Deadline	January	February	March
(Annual goal)	12/31/2025
(Macro plan item)	3/31/2025	Draft event scope sheet	Invite team to meeting	Host event

At 1-month resolution, list out what needs to happen in order to achieve that goal. Some months may be blank if the task doesn't need any work that month.

Monthly

The monthly sheet is a mirror of the annual sheet: tasks down the side, time across the top. Now the time is weeks, and there's an additional column as a reminder of that month's tasks. I keep the annual task to remind me of intent. Normally I label the weeks by their Monday dates: it avoids the "is this the first or second week of the month?" questions.

Annual Task	Monthly Task	3/3	3/10	3/17
(Annual goal)	(March's task)
(Macro plan item)	Host event	Collect prework	Event! Set up follow-up calls	Follow-up calls; report-out

At the end of each week, I review the tasks for that week and color-code them red (not completed), yellow (partial), or green (completed). If needed, I copy any uncompleted tasks into the coming week or otherwise shuffle around the tasks based on what happened this past week. Finally, I ensure that all of my tasks for the coming week are in my regular to-do list.

Conclusion

Leader standard work keeps my various long-term tasks at the top of my mind, where otherwise I'd be spending all of my time on the daily firefighting tasks. In 2024, I completed 100% of my annual goals with the exception of rolling out a new Request-for-Quote tool, which was limited by other teams not being able to provide testers for the pilot program. Throughout the year I constantly reminded myself of what I wanted to get done on longer timescales and allowed me to break down the tasks into "to-do list size".

So let me know in the LinkedIn comments: do you get to your annual performance review and then say "whoops"? If that's too much to put in writing, how do you stay on-track with your annual goals?

And remember: "Choose goals, build a schedule, and have the willpower to follow it - or be left behind by those of us who do."

If you have any comments, please reach out to me at blog@saprobst.com or this page is cross-posted at LinkedIn and you can leave a comment there.

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