Balancing Stability and Stretch: Lead Your Team’s Routine…Then Its Growth

Responsibilities as a manager or leader of a team can feel endlessly complex—aligning strategic goals with results, project planning and oversight, personnel issues, never-ending urgent fires, long-term visions, growth initiatives, culture building…the list goes on. But at its core, I believe every leader is responsible for mastering just two enduring responsibilities, which can help us mentally organize and prioritize our efforts:

(1) Doing routine things routinely, which is keeping the regular cycle turning.
(2) Improving the organization, steadily developing the team and its systems.

I picture these two responsibilities as symbols, which a leader holds in each hand simultaneously:

  • A rotating arrow, representing the cyclic nature of daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms: calendars, meetings, task tracking, communication systems, and feedback loops.
  • A staircase, representing progress over time: improvements to processes, structure, team organization, space, systems, and development.

To give it more meaning, I connect this dualistic model with my favorite definition of leadership, which comes from US Army doctrine: Leadership exists to accomplish the mission (cycle) and improve the organization (staircase).

Good leaders do both. Great leaders do them deliberately and with balance.

 

What This Looks Like in Practice

Routine Things: Get Organized, Stay Organized

What do we mean by the rotating cycle of routine things? It’s about starting with “doing routine things routinely…and well.” Our team might be energized about capitalizing on the latest technology, say AI for example, and focused on how we initiate this massive, re-structuring effort. However, the team can’t seem to get people on the same page about the inputs and outputs of the staff meeting, leading people to come to it unprepared or, maybe worse, unclear about the assigned actions to take afterwards. Doing routine things routinely means getting organized first to set the essential foundation upon which all further efforts are based. This includes things like:

  • The team working off a singular group calendar to ensure all events and activities are shared to keep people on the same page. 
  • Having a clear battle rhythm (military phrase) for your team’s weekly cadence. Ensure your team’s meetings, reports, decision-making, and other crucial activities are standardized in a predictable flow and clearly captured for shared awareness. 
  • An organized and visible task tracking system so teammates are sure about who is currently responsible for what, what the expectations and outputs are, and when certain things are due. 

If our team can get organized, then remain accountable to the established routines and processes, we then have the capacity and fighting chance to get better. 

Improving the Organization

Improvement is simply how we are improving our team. It can be our processes, tools, team norms, and so on. However, improvement doesn’t always mean massive transformation. It can be as small as:

  • Cleaning up a chaotic office space.
  • Reorganizing the team’s SharePoint or Slack channels (wherever you digitally communicate and share files).
  • Creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) for routine work.
  • Actually creating a team battle rhythm.

Or it can be bigger:

  • Redesigning your team’s decision-making process.
  • Creating a thoughtful and deliberate onboarding process for new members to ramp up faster and feel welcomed.
  • Restructuring meetings, like moving away from mere status updates to problem-solving discussions.
  • Introducing a skill or leader development system of integrated activities to your team.

 

A Few Thoughts for Action

So how can leaders live out these two responsibilities? Here are four practical recommendations:

1. Start with the Routine Things Routinely First

If your calendar is a mess, task tracking is inconsistent, or meetings lack clarity, you’re not ready for big innovation.
Before climbing the staircase, lock in the circle. Establish rock-solid rhythms:

  • A shared, accessible calendar that everyone trusts.
  • Clear weekly/daily battle rhythms.
  • A reliable task tracking system.
  • Well-structured, purposeful meetings.

Before you scale innovation, stabilize operations.

2. Treat Improvement as Change—And Lead It Like Change

Improving the organization is change, and change is hard.

Don’t casually toss out, “Hey, we’ll reorganize the files next week.”
Instead:

  • Define why the change matters.
  • Establish clear goals and guidelines.
  • Introduce it deliberately—with timing, expectations, and checkpoints.
  • Continually communicate the benefit.

People don’t resist change. They resist unclear change.

3. Assign a Champion for Each Improvement Effort

Don’t carry every improvement effort yourself. Instead, delegate ownership:

  • Pick someone from the team to be the champion of the change.
  • Empower them with intent, authority, and resources.

This does two things:
✅ It involves others and builds ownership, not compliance.
✅ It prevents improvement work from overwhelming your capacity as the leader.

4. Improve Based on Priority and Capacity

Improvement should be sequenced, not stacked

Ask two questions:

  1. What’s the most important or highest-impact improvement we need? Start there.
  2. Does the team have capacity right now? If they’re in a heavy execution season, press pause. Growth and grind shouldn't compete.

Improvement is continuous, but it shouldn’t be constant. A single step in the staircase model may be long due to extended time between improvement efforts, and that’s ok.

 

Leaders Ought to Keep the Flywheel Turning While Climbing the Staircase

Growing up, my mom taught me not to confuse motion with progress. Leadership isn’t just about motion, it’s about maintenance and momentum

The world notices leaders who boldly climb the staircase—who reshape culture, launch initiatives, and drive change. As leaders, we are in the business of making people, teams, and things better. 

But teams trust leaders who keep the wheel turning—who bring structure, discipline, clarity, and consistency.

So, do both deliberately and consistently. And always in that order.

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