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Most leader standard work content is written by people who have already made it work. This session is the rarer one — written and delivered by someone in the middle of doing it, willing to talk openly about what's worked, what hasn't, and what he's adjusting heading into year two.
Brent Loescher leads learning, development, and continuous improvement at Sperber Companies, a fast-growing landscape maintenance and construction business operating in 14 states. He came up through Toyota Motor Sales (where he got his TPS chops in North American Parts Operations), spent 21 years in the US Army and Army Reserve, and co-wrote the leader standard work course that runs in Karen Martin's TKMG Academy. The combination matters because his framework for LSW is unusually well thought through — and his honesty about what falls apart in practice is unusually useful.
His framing for the session was direct: this isn't "how we did it." This is "how we've started, how we are going so far." That's the right way to receive what follows.
Sperber is less than six years old. It's already in the top 10 largest landscape companies in the United States. Sixteen of the seventeen landscape businesses joined the company through acquisition, which means Sperber operates through 30+ branches with 15-16 widely varying cultures, each with its own decades of operational practice.
That structure is the actual problem. Leader standard work in a single facility with one culture is hard. Leader standard work across 30+ branches with 16 inherited cultures is a fundamentally different challenge. Family-run businesses that operated successfully for 30, 40, 50 years before joining Sperber don't change because someone at corporate sends a deck. They change when they see why the change matters and when the right conditions are in place to make it stick.
A specific signal of the scale problem: when the team peeled back the onion on roles, they had over 220 different titles being used at the branch level for what was essentially the same set of jobs. You can't build training programs, career development paths, or shared standards on top of 220 titles for the same work. Aligning the language was a precondition to aligning the practice.
Brent and Karen Martin spent significant time on this when they wrote the TKMG Academy course. Their starting point was unusual. Most LSW conversations jump straight to "what should leaders do." Brent and Karen reframed the question first: what are leaders actually responsible for? Without that, the activities have no anchor.
They landed on six key responsibilities of any leader.
Uphold the purpose, mission, values, and goals of the organization. If not them, who.
Manage process and performance. The financial outcomes and the processes that produce them.
Build and foster a culture of excellence. Create a thinking, learning organization that gets better at the work it does.
Develop their people. Resist the trap of holding all the knowledge and making all the decisions. Elevate the team.
Build and manage relationships. Internal and external. Team, peers, customers, stakeholders.
Learn continuously. The reason anyone watches a webinar like this one in the first place.
Brent has pressure-tested these six against many different leadership levels and contexts over the years. His view is that they hold across roles, industries, and organizational types — including ones he wouldn't normally work in, like a government agency or a healthcare team.
From those six responsibilities, he and Karen worked out seven activities leaders should standardize.
Plan and prepare. Brent observed early in his landscaping career that leaders who took snow plowing seriously — boards, charts, equipment locations because snow gives only a couple of days notice — would show up to summer landscape maintenance with almost no preparation, despite doing that work every week. The asymmetry baffled him. Planning matters in both seasons.
Actively manage the daily work. What's the expectation today, and where do we need to course-correct.
Go see. Get to the gemba. See the work, see the opportunities.
Coach for professional development. Different from coaching for problem-solving. This is helping the people in your purview be better at what they do and reach their career goals.
Coach for problem-solving. Build the team's capacity to solve problems rather than escalating every issue to the leader.
Develop and manage relationships. Time blocked for the people work, not just task work.
Reflect. The quote Brent likes: we don't learn from the experience, we learn from reflecting on the experience.
The framework that gives the activities their teeth. Different leadership levels need different ratios of standardized (non-discretionary) time to flexible (discretionary) time.
Frontline supervisors closest to the work should run roughly 75-80% non-discretionary time. The closer you are to the work, the more your value comes from showing up reliably to the same routines.
The next layer up should run closer to 50-50. More flexibility to react to issues across multiple groups or areas.
Executive-level leaders run more discretionary time — 20% or less standardized — because they're reacting to external stakeholders, board issues, customer escalations, and strategic decisions. But the seven activities still apply. The executive doesn't get to skip them. They just allocate less time to them.
The point is not to script every minute of any leader's day. The point is to ensure the essential leadership behaviors actually happen reliably instead of getting crowded out by the urgent.
A 16-business, 30-branch rollout cannot reasonably attack everything at once. The team made deliberate choices about where to start.
The CEO's framing set the tone. Jeff is a Navy veteran who spent his career on nuclear missile submarines. His phrase that recurs through every Sperber training is "consistent leadership practices" — leader standard work in plainer language. His grounding analogy: there's one way to turn on a nuclear reactor on a submarine. Everyone is taught the same way. The safety and functionality of the vessel depends on it. That kind of executive sponsorship for consistency made the work possible.
The first-year focus narrowed to two of the six responsibilities — culture, and process and performance management. Within those, the team focused on a subset of activities: actively managing the daily work, going to see, and developing and managing relationships, especially on the client-facing side.
Within culture, safety came first. Year-over-year reduction in total recordable incidents has been substantial — the data Brent shows in the session reflects real progress. The mechanics are familiar to anyone who runs a strong safety program: leaders show up first, dressed in the same PPE they expect from the team. Stretch and flex routines run every morning. Some leaders bring speakers and music. The point is the leader is present, modeling, and engaging — not delivering safety bulletins from a distance.
The role and title alignment work was equally important even if less visible. Reducing 220 titles into a coherent structure for client-facing, production-facing, business development, and administrative roles took zoom sessions, in-person training, and a year of deliberate work. The payoff: when leaders from across the company gathered in Dallas a year in, the conversation sounded different. Common language had taken hold.
The McKinsey engagement and 8-10 week boots-on-the-ground site visits at individual businesses are where Sperber piloted some of the more substantive LSW practices. The huddle structure that came out of that work is worth lifting.
A Level 1 huddle is the production-facing leader meeting with their four or five crew leaders at the start of the day. Do they have what they need. Do they know where they're going. Do they know how much time they're supposed to be there. Do they have the people, tools, and equipment.
A Level 2 huddle happens after the crews have left. Production-facing leaders, client-facing leaders, and the branch manager talk about the day together — what's planned, what's at risk, what needs adjustment.
A Level 3 huddle hasn't fully landed yet at most branches. Some businesses are ready for it. Others aren't.
What did land: the practice spread organically beyond the original two pilot locations to a third, when a leader who had moved between businesses said "we are much better off if we do this huddle thing I learned at the last place." That kind of pull-based adoption is more durable than push-based mandates.
The story Brent tells about the huddle that worked too well is worth sharing in full. One leader at a Florida branch was caught in traffic behind an accident on the morning of huddle week two. He didn't make it on time. When he finally arrived, his team was already at their designated huddle spot, running the huddle without him. Each crew leader was telling the others where they were going that day and asking if anyone needed help. The behavior had moved from the leader's responsibility to the team's habit faster than the leader did. That's a strong signal that a routine has actually taken root.
Landscaping has an unusual gemba. It's the front yard. The park. The entryway to a resort. The work happens distributed across a region every day. Going to see, in this context, requires intentional effort — and the leaders Brent works with had to learn how to observe rather than do.
Landscaping is what he calls "very distractionary." When leaders arrive at a job site, the instinct is to pick up branches and pull weeds themselves. He doesn't argue with that instinct in the moment — picking up the branch is fine. But the primary purpose of the visit is observation, with three specific lenses he asks leaders to bring.
Look for safety. The most important thing they do for their teams every day.
Look for quality. What customers expect.
Look for waste. The things that scratch the head and prompt the question of why we're doing it that way.
He tells one story about catching a team in a conference room mid-conversation about how to improve their fertilizer and chemical storage. Two minutes in, he stopped them: can we go to the actual storage area and have this conversation there? Get out of the chairs. Make it lively. The conversation that followed was substantively different from what was happening at the conference table.
The four-step framework Brent's team has built for client-facing leaders during job site visits.
Engage the operations team. Observe the work, check in on the crew, eat lunch with them if they're on break. Are they on track for the day's work.
See the job. Know what's going well and what isn't before you engage the client. Show up informed.
Engage the client. Tell them you're literally on their side. Tell them what you see. Ask what they need next.
Add value to the job site. Pick up the branch. Pull the weed. The leaders who only observe and never contribute send a message; the leaders who do both contribute and observe build a different kind of trust.
The framing matters because landscaping is fundamentally a relationship business. Brent admits he didn't fully appreciate this when he came into the industry from Toyota. Living, breathing things — plants, grass, trees — combined with Mother Nature (two of Sperber's Florida businesses dealt with hurricanes during the year) means there's an enormous amount of variability customers have to trust the company to handle. That trust gets built through visible, regular, useful presence. Leader standard work supports that presence rather than getting in its way.
The honest reflection section, which is where the session earns most of its weight. Five lessons.
The leader is the culture creator. Whether they intend it or not, leaders are creating culture every day. The question is whether they're being intentional or accidental about it. If a leader shows up in the morning without their safety boots on, they've communicated something about safety culture regardless of what they say in the morning huddle.
The right conditions must exist. Don't roll leader standard work into a business based on a calendar. Ask first whether that business and that leader are ready. Leadership transitions in progress, new leaders being onboarded, businesses still digesting a recent acquisition — those aren't ideal conditions for adding new structural change.
Teams respond faster than their leaders sometimes. The Florida huddle story is the case in point. When leaders introduce behaviors that genuinely make a difference, team members often pick them up faster than the leaders do. That's not a knock on the leaders — it's a feature of the dynamic. The challenge for the rolling-out organization is to be ready for the team's willingness to outpace its leadership and to support both sides through the lag.
It takes reps to build new behaviors. Sperber spent significant time sharing information and turning it into knowledge. Where Brent acknowledges they fell short was in the experience — the time and patience required for new knowledge to translate into new behavior. The 8-10 week pilots produced real change. The shorter, lower-touch interventions did not. Reps matter, and so does the design of the practice space.
It takes patience and humility. Brent named this last point as one he added to his list two days before the session, after his own reflection on the year. Both he and the leaders he's been working with have experienced frustration. Fallbacks happen. The work is a practice, like any other practice, and recognizing that — for himself and for the leaders he supports — has been part of what's needed to keep going.
A few specific things the platform does that connect to Brent's framework.
Daily dashboards in KaiNexus give branch managers a real-time view of their P&L, team performance, and operational metrics. The same dashboards roll up so executive leaders can see across the system. When a weekly call asks "bring up your dashboard and walk us through it," the leader who hasn't opened it in five weeks becomes visible quickly.
The platform supports leader rounding, huddle documentation, and the cascading reporting that connects daily work to weekly reviews to monthly P&L conversations. The shared structure across 30+ branches is what makes consistent leadership practice possible without micromanagement.
If you're trying to roll out leader standard work across a distributed business and depending on email, spreadsheets, and individual leader discipline to make it stick, the math doesn't work. KaiNexus is the infrastructure that lets the framework actually scale.
Brent Loescher has spent more than 20 years working in and on the businesses he's been a part of, improving operations across high-speed manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, distributed services, and government agencies. He received his formal Toyota Production System training while working for Toyota Motor Sales in their North American Parts Operations and is a certified TPS trainer. While at Toyota, he led the operational design of two new warehouses in Puerto Rico and Mexico City. He helped develop a Lean program for the landscape maintenance industry starting in 2009, including co-leading the operational integration of a $2 billion merger. Brent currently leads Learning & Development and Continuous Improvement at Sperber Companies. He holds a BA in Business Management from Mercyhurst University and is a retired military veteran with 21 years of service in the US Army and US Army Reserve. He co-wrote the Leader Standard Work Basics course at TKMG Academy with Karen Martin.
What is leader standard work?
Leader standard work is the set of activities, behaviors, and routines that leaders follow to ensure consistency, support their teams, and reinforce the culture of the organization. It's distinct from standard work for a process operator — it defines what leaders should be doing, how often, and why. The framework covers six core responsibilities (uphold purpose and values, manage process and performance, build a culture of excellence, develop people, build and manage relationships, learn continuously) and seven activities (plan and prepare, actively manage daily work, go see, coach for professional development, coach for problem-solving, develop and manage relationships, reflect).
How much of a leader's time should be standardized?
It depends on level. Frontline supervisors closest to the work should run roughly 75-80% non-discretionary time on the seven activities. Mid-level leaders should run closer to 50-50. Executives run more discretionary time because they're reacting to external stakeholders, but the seven activities still apply — they just take less of the day. The point is not to script every minute. The point is to ensure essential leadership behaviors happen reliably rather than getting crowded out by the urgent.
Why does leader standard work fail in distributed organizations?
Because leadership practices drift when leaders are spread across multiple locations, business units, or regions. Expectations vary. Habits become inconsistent. Improvement efforts depend too heavily on individual leaders rather than reliable systems. The results show up as variable performance and improvement programs that lose momentum. Leader standard work addresses the drift by defining what consistency looks like — without removing the judgment leaders need to apply in their specific context.
How should you introduce leader standard work to leaders who have been doing things their own way for decades?
With patience, empathy, and the recognition that change can be scary even for highly successful leaders. Brent's experience: understand their perspective first, learn how they currently do things, identify what's working that you want to keep, and frame the new practice as transitional rather than replacement. The right conditions matter — leadership transitions in progress, recent acquisitions still settling, or businesses in the middle of other major change are usually not the right moment to add LSW.
How do you handle huddles in a distributed business?
Sperber uses a cascading structure: Level 1 huddles between production leaders and crew leaders at the start of the day, Level 2 huddles among production leaders, client-facing leaders, and the branch manager after crews have left. The practice spread organically when a leader who had experienced it at one branch moved to another and started it himself. Pull-based adoption tends to be more durable than push-based mandates.
What does effective gemba observation look like in a service business?
Look for safety, quality, and waste — three specific lenses that direct attention away from the instinct to do the work yourself and toward genuine observation. Brent's experience in landscaping is that the gemba (the front yard, the park, the resort entryway) is naturally distractionary; leaders want to pick up branches and pull weeds rather than observe. Doing both — observing primarily, contributing where appropriate — is the discipline that builds the capacity to see what's actually happening.
What's the most common mistake organizations make with leader standard work?
Treating it as information transfer rather than behavior change. Brent's reflection on year one at Sperber: the team did a lot of sharing information and turning it into knowledge, but didn't always give leaders enough time, patience, or experience to translate the knowledge into behavior. Reps matter. The 8-10 week boots-on-the-ground pilots produced durable change. Shorter, lower-touch interventions did not.
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