Working Through the Everyday Leadership Worksheet
The worksheet comes from Brian Cagan's TED Talk on everyday leadership, and it's designed to help people identify leadership moments in their daily work rather than waiting for a title to hand them authority. I've seen a lot of people struggle with this document because they treat it like a form to fill out quickly rather than a tool that actually requires some honesty. The answers aren't something you can just look up online and copy. The point of the worksheet is that you work through it yourself. Here is what the worksheet actually asks and how to approach each section properly. The first section typically asks you to describe a recent situation where you stepped up without being asked. Most people blank on this. The trick is to think about moments when you noticed a problem and fixed it even though it wasn't your job description. This could be something small like reorganizing a shared document team members kept misusing, or something larger like volunteering to lead a project when nobody else wanted to. Write the situation down with specifics: what happened, who was involved, and what you did differently than everyone else expected to.
The second part usually asks you to reflect on your natural leadership style. The worksheet gives you options or prompts to identify whether you lead by example, by encouraging others, by solving problems, or by organizing and planning. I found that people tend to misidentify their style because they think about leadership the way movies show it. Real leadership is quieter than that. One person I worked with couldn't figure out their style until we went through their calendar for the past month and they realized they were constantly the one unblocking other people's work without getting credit for it. That's a specific type of leadership most folks don't recognize in themselves. The next section generally asks you to identify obstacles that hold you back from leading more often. Common answers include fear of saying the wrong thing, not having formal authority, thinking leadership belongs to managers only, or burnout from doing too much without recognition. Be honest here because if you skip over the real reasons you hold back, the whole exercise falls apart. I had someone put down "I'm too busy" as their main obstacle, and when we dug into it, the actual problem was they felt their contributions wouldn't matter anyway. Different fix entirely. The final portion usually involves creating an action plan. Pick one concrete thing you will do differently in the next two weeks to practice everyday leadership. The worksheet works best when this is specific enough that you can actually evaluate whether you did it. "Be more of a leader" is worthless. "I will speak up in the Monday standup with at least one suggestion about how we can improve our workflow" is something you can measure.
One thing most guides don't mention: the worksheet is somewhat generic because it's meant to apply across different industries and roles. That means you might find sections that feel irrelevant to your actual job. I ran into this when a nurse tried to use the framework designed for corporate office workers. The core concepts still applied, but she had to translate the examples. A leadership moment for her wasn't about project management or team dynamics in the traditional sense. It was about speaking up when patient handoff procedures were inconsistent and risking pushback from senior staff. The worksheet structure held up fine once she reframed the scenarios. Another counter-intuitive point that catches people off guard: filling out the worksheet faster isn't better. I've watched people breeze through it in ten minutes and then wonder why they didn't learn anything from it. The exercise takes about twenty to thirty minutes if you actually sit with each question. Rushing it defeats the whole purpose. If you're looking for the actual document, it's available through the Everyday Leaders initiative and various organizational development resources that reference Cagan's talk. Search for the Everyday Leadership Toolkit or the Everyday Leaders framework. Some universities and consulting firms host copies. The worksheet itself is usually a single page or two with the prompts I outlined above.
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There are limitations worth noting. The worksheet assumes you have some autonomy in your role. If you work in a highly controlled environment where stepping outside your assigned duties carries real penalties, the exercise becomes more theoretical than practical. In those cases, the action plan section needs heavy revision before it's useful. You'd be better off focusing on identifying safe, low-risk moments to practice leadership behaviors rather than planning bigger moves that could backfire. Another issue is that the worksheet measures self-perception, not actual behavior change. Writing that you'll do something doesn't mean you will. The real value comes from revisiting the worksheet after a few weeks and checking whether your action plan actually happened. Without that follow-through, it's just another form you filled out and forgot about. I'd recommend pairing it with a brief weekly check-in, either with a colleague or just in your own notes, to track progress on whatever action you committed to. That alone makes the difference between a worksheet that feels like homework and one that actually shifts how you show up at work.
