Importance of Leader Standard Work

 In a lean environment there’s no place for denial. It’s all about systems being at place and operating with transparency. For systems to work people in charge of those systems, must identify abnormal conditions and act upon it. But, should they wait for those conditions to appear or should they be pro-active. In technical terms should the action be troubleshooting, preventive or predictive???? Most organisations and firms go for preventive but the quality and cost leaders, be it service, manufacturing, marketing or any other domain go for predictive action…In layman’s term pro-active approach.  Not surprisingly the firms with lean culture or BPM are the predictive gurus.

This is not because they hire the best, but they make the best follow a regular pattern of work, which is documented and the compliance is regularly ensured…..The document is called Leader Standard Work (LSW).

Leader standard work is SDCA (standardize-do-check-act) in action. It seeks to determine whether standards are being adhered to and whether they are sufficient – very important stuff when you are to trying to sustain lean gains and develop a lean culture. The result is a PDCA(Plan-Do-Check-Act) activity which follows.

The On job time(OJT) at different hierarchy levels may differ for say an executive(70%) to a GM(30%). It doesn’t mean that LSW is flawed, infact it shows us the perfect data about time required by an employee at different levels for value added activity or a supporting activity. GM’s profile demands link up with other departments, even with suppliers and customers in some cases. So his OJT will be different that other employees.

The audit of LSW is an essential part in the whole system. With the full-compliance of audits the problems will be transparent. How does  this work??? If an employee is not able to follow LSW either he is a slacking or there is some issue. Slackness can be dealt by assigning his task to others or coaching him, depending on the importance of the task. If there is an issue, it will be brought to the surface and will be visible to everybody. It’s easy to deal with a visible problem rather than going behind the tedious process of finding it.

The superior’s leader standard work must also require managers to go to the Gemba  and ensure that the subordinate is working in accordance with standard work – steps, sequence, cycle time, and standard work-in-process. Anything less than that and we’re in the plausible deniability realm, taking the “word” of the second hand information and never verifying…even though we may have more than an inkling that the system is breaking down. “Hey, my subordinate was checking that in their LSW …”

It’s not that we shouldn’t trust people; we just need to be good lean pragmatists. We need to model the proper behaviours and actively lead and coach. Good leader standard work, and thus SDCA, does not co-exist with loose and informal chains (of command). Nothing deniable there.

Leaders disciplined adherence to process makes Lean Management work. Leader at any level must be most disciplined of all, be it a technician or a GM. In the end we have to build a system in our future organisations or make the existing ones stronger. So who will make it work…WE.