Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and Goala giving. This is the seven Minute Leadership Podcast with your host Paul Fellovaledo.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the seven Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode three twenty five, and let's talk about cheat sheets. Not the kind that you used in high school when you forgot to study. I'm talking about the kind that high performers use every day to eliminate guestwork, reduce errors, and stay consistent. As a leader, you're surrounded by recurring tasks. The daily grind of leadership often includes a lot of
rinse and repeat type of work. Whether it's onboarding new team members, running a morning huddle, checking vehicles, or doing a pre shift report. These things pop up again and again, and if you're like me, you've probably realized there's no honor in winging it. There's only chaos. And that's why I create cheat sheets for my staff. Let me give you a few examples. At my ambulance service, I've built cheat sheets for my EMTs and paramedics. We've got one
for medication calculations. Because the last thing you want in a high stress situation is to stop and do long division in your head. We've got another one for truck checks so our crews never miss a piece of equipment before a shift. And we even have a cheat sheet with all of the hospital er door codes on them so that our teams aren't fumbling with locked doors while trying to deliver a patient to the emergency room. In those little sheets, they've saved us time, prevented mistakes, and
made our people a little more confident. And this doesn't just apply to ems, it's everywhere. I am also a pilot. When I fly, I have cheat sheets for glide distance based on my altitude and air speed in case I have an engine failure, one for a pre flight inspection, and several others for aeronautical rules and emergency procedures. These aren't optional for me, they're mandatory because in the air,
clarity keeps you alive. Leadership is the same way you can't afford to guess your way through key decisions, and your team shouldn't be relying on memory or experience alone for important, repeatable tasks. That's not scalable, it's not sustainable, and it's just not smart. So here's why cheat sheets matter. Number one, they create consistency. No matter who's doing the job,
the outcome stays the same. They reduce cognitive load. Your brain only has so much bandwidth, save it for bigger problems, and they improve on board. New employees get up to speed faster when they have something clearer to follow, and they eliminate gaps in performance. Ever had someone say, oh, I didn't know I was supposed to do that. A cheat sheet makes that excuse impossible. So what kind of
cheat sheets should you be creating in your world? Well, if you're in public safety, maybe, like I said, it's an ambulance checklist, call out procedures, or post incident debrief types of templates. If you're in business, it could be sales calls, client onboarding, project handoff procedures, or quarterly report preparation. Even in personal leadership, you can cheat sheet your morning routine,
your weekly goal review, or your monthly budget breakdown. So let's be clear, creating a cheat sheet doesn't mean you're lazy or that your people can't think. It means you care about precision, you care about quality, and you understand that even the best athletes still use a playbook. So here's your challenge for this week, Take fifteen minutes and build one cheat sheet for a task that you or your team do more than once a week. Keep it simple,
make it easy to follow and share it. Leadership isn't about remembering everything. It's about building systems that work even when you're tired, distracted, or even out of the office. If it matters, cheat sheet it. This has been a seven minute leadership podcast and I thank you for listening.
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