Q 392. Leader Standard Work (LSW) can help build Continuous Improvement Culture in an organization. Explain LSW and its advantages.

 

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What is Leader Standard Work?

 

Leader Standard Work (LSW) is a documented method for supervisors, managers and directors to drive lean thinking & its behaviour throughout an organization. 

 

Leader Standard Work explained in detail:

• This is similar concept to Standard work where a process, particular task or procedure is documented to ensure that it is made as a standard and followed until a new or improved standard is devised.

• The only difference is that this applies to leadership team for an organization.

• Leader standard work helps leaders at all levels with a set of tasks, actions, behaviours and tools that they need to incorporate into their day to day activities. This is to ensure that they imbibe and exhibit a behaviour which they want their team to follow and thus lead to continuous improvement mindset across the team/organisation

How can Leader Standard Work be deployed in an organization?

 

There are various ways Leader Standard work can be deployed in an organization

 

Strategy deployment:

• Also called as Hoshin Kanri, it is a method of systematically breaking down organizations long term goals (3 to 5 years) into an yearly goal and therefore into very specific actionable goals or KPIs for various interdependent teams and functions.
• Having a governance mechanism of reviewing these goals for various functions and teams from time to time is a way Leader Standard Work can be deployed.
• This will ensure that the small initiatives or goals are not off track or rather met, therefore leading to achieving yearly goal.

Gemba walks:

• Another way Leader Standard work can be deployed at supervisory and manager level is by doing floor walks. 
• A leader should do Gemba walks or floor walks to observe first hand how his/her team members are working on their day to day tasks and see if there are any opportunities for improvement.
• Leader can also interact with the team members and ask the right questions to ensure he gets right insights into any potential challenges/issues that the team might be facing.

 

Huddles or Team meetings:

• Conducting Team meetings is another method by which leader standard work can be deployed in an organization.
• These team meetings/huddles are a great opportunity for a leader to interact with the team.
  • Understand how the day to day deliverables are being done
  • Are there any challenges or issues that the team is facing
  • Any learnings that can be gathered based on the challenges faced in past
  • Opportunity to learn from others mistake
• This is a also an excellent opportunity for the leaders to identify any potential issue and fix it quickly before it becomes a big problem.

Individual mentoring or coaching:

• Having a one on one coaching or mentoring with your potential leaders or leaders/supervisors is another way one can implement leader standard work at a work place.
• This approach allows the mentor to coach the mentee on various standard practice the supervisors should follow and how to follow them
• This is one of the best way to also build your personal connect with the team and it's key supervisors.
• This method also creates a cascading impact in an organization which badly needs a mindset or culture of continuous improvement.

Having a set procedure or practice in place:

• Having a set procedure or practice in place as a culture also helps in implementing Leader Standard Work.
• Standard practices like monthly review meetings/feedback with the team members.
• Consistently focus on skill building exercise for every member of the team.
• Ensuring that there is a consistent and regular reward and recognition that happens in a team.
• Ensuring regular analysis of errors and therefore working on their mitigation or how can we avoid them in future.

How can Leader Standard work help an organization?

• Consistent flawless delivery: All of these practices can ensure that an organization can always achieve consistent, predictable and repeatable results and will be able to delight their customers all the time with their work.
• Repeat Business from the customer: Owing #1, the organization can enjoy repeat business from the customer.
• Lower Sales and Marketing costs: Owing #2, the company can enjoy lower sales and marketing costs. In fact, their sales team can focus on acquiring other new customers.
• High Productivity and therefore far better margins: Owing to a culture of continuous improvement, their will be very less rework and high productivity within the team. Therefore the company can enjoy far better margins
• Employee Satisfaction and Retention: As their leaders are very much hands-on with the team and the process, the employees will always feel the trust and connected and also see that they are in good hands (read leaders).. this way the employee satisfaction index will be very high and therefore lower employee churn.  

 

 

 

Leader Standard Work or LSW is a set of behaviors, tools and actions that are integrated into the daily activities of leaders at all levels in an organization. This fosters a lean thinking corporate culture. Lean Standard Work must be documented and put into consistent practice. When opportunities present itself, the processes need to be improved through experimentation and reflection.

A few processes that usually make up a part of Lean Standard Work are

·        Hoshin Kanari or Strategy Development: In the case of Lean Standard Work the organizations long term goals and visions are kept in view and worked towards on a daily basis.

·        Gemba Walks: In Lean Standard Work the leader visits and takes stock of the processes under them at regular intervals, and in order to not make it repetitive the leader should document the purpose of their Gemba walk and what they observed on it.

·        Huddle Meetings: These are short meetings where employees can bring to their manager any issues or challenges.

The main advantage of Lean Standard Work is that it fosters organizational change by insisting on behavioral changes in the organization’s leaders, by doing this, it makes the leaders lead from the from and the rest of the organization follows. Lean Standard Work is one of the best ways to initiate lean processes in an organization and the added benefit is that ensure easy sustenance or maintenance of Lean processes and Lean Culture.

Leader Standard Work (LSW) is beyond standardized work for leaders. It ensures influencing leadership philosophy and helps moving away from traditional leadership value proposition to critical work, leaders need to do to implement and sustain improvements in culture, performance and practices within organizations. This brings a fundamental change to a leader’s role, mimics the behavior they desire to see and sets the example for best practices. Thus, LSW as a management philosophy that instils values of ownership, responsibility, accountability and empowerment across all levels. 

 

LSW: This is a lean concept. However, it is not same as operator standard work. LSW has both up and downwards accountability - evaluated daily or multiple times in a day using different visual controls. One must follow it daily because it not only helps to verify that work is carried out properly, also ensures that everybody is considered accountable to work to the standard. It is primarily focused on activities at the  ground level (Gemba) as well as supporting incremental improvements.

 

Getting a standardized process to perform, more importantly when it is visual to all stakeholders - is a way of earmarking and ensuring all agrees to the process. Once a standard is established, it provides a solution from which teams can easily scrutinize and improve it on continuous basis. Improvement is easier in a streamlined approach. Putting this standard in place is crucial for any leader to empower their teams so that they can solve their own problems and improve the underlying processes. It is to be ensured that the standard is first established.

Digital technologies enhances scope of the implementation of LSW across an organization:

Digital tools and technologies helps streamlining and accelerating the improvement process. They can support the implementation of LSW primarily in two ways.

• Digital platform can automatically trigger the issues and get leadership focus on areas where more enablement is needed. Data visualization is possible and the same is communicated to foster faster decision-making at the right level. Digitalization also supports virtual work possibilities.
• Going digital also enables more transparency between levels and functions across organization. Better transparency of information guarantees the culture that leadership is trying to implement.

These tools and technologies are of valuable support to leaders -helping them identifying LSW activities and improve business performance. Further, it links them to standard work and helps execution in a consistent approach across the business – this helps people, various practices and enabling processes stay integrated.

Often times I have heard people saying only repetitive, monotonous tasks can be standardized or only “factory model” can be standardized as that is transactional but “knowledge processing” tasks cannot be standardized especially when it comes to managing the tasks of Team Leaders and Managers.

Lean Standard Work can be used conceptually to avoid being completely dependent on Managers/Team Leaders to build the culture within their teams, their own way, without any pre-defined standard tasks to be performed.

Standardized work is applicable to a greater or lesser degree, across all organizational levels. We need to decide how much of leader’s work can be standardized.

As the name suggests Leader Standard Work is about standardizing some of the tasks performed by leaders and not only that but also bringing in a great shift in mindset that it’s only possible to standardize work at the executive level.

In order to develop common culture across the floor it is important that leaders are driven by common set of values. This means that even culture, behavior and mindset could be standardized to some extent.

Included in standard work for leaders (managers and team leaders) is up- and downwards accountability that is evaluated on a daily basis or several times a day using visual controls. Daily evaluation is critical, because it not only verifies that work is being done properly, but ensures that everybody is held accountable for working to the standard. Most of the leader’s standard work is focused on activities at the place where work is done (gemba) with the remaining time spent supporting incremental improvements. (https://traccsolution.com/blog/leader-standard-work/)

How can this help build continuous improvement culture?

As it is often said that “What gets measured gets managed or what gets measured gets done”. Based on this concept in order to identify opportunities for improvement it is crucial to measure the current performance and in order to measure it, it is also important to draw out a list of standard practices to be followed by the leaders across the organization. This would in turn help build a continuous improvement culture where there are no biases when it comes to measuring the performance of individuals at each level in the organization.

Advantages of Lean Standard Work -

1. As they say right examples are set at the top of the organization and from there culture seeps down to lower levels. If standard set of expectations are set from the leaders and their tasks are evaluated, this would create a culture of “fact based approach” in the organization which would in turn eliminate people dependency.

2. For continuous improvement it is important to have quantitative data and such practices ensures that.

3. This also helps in eliminating the concept of each team or each department having it’s own culture. It is important that the organization is run on some common set of values.

 

‘Standardizing leaders work is not possible’ is a myth.

If we observe and analyse leaders work prudently, we would understand that their work is monotonous and certainly there would be scope for standardization if not 100% of the work. There may be only few activities which cannot be standardized as it may require human intelligence, creativity, flexibility, and innovation.

Leader Standard Work is a set of actions, tools, and behaviours that can be integrated into the day-to-day actions of the leaders.

To develop a Lean Culture, similar to the standard work for any process, it is essential that Leader Standard Work too is documented and practiced.

It provides a consistent and systematic method for leaders to drive business and process excellence quality projects and derive positive outcome. It helps leaders to focus and run all important activities smoothly.

Absence of LWS would lead to variation in actual work done by the leaders across various workstreams and functions of the business at different time and intervals.

Hence, planning & executing, being compliant with day to day documentation along with prioritisation, tractions of all critical leader activities is absolutely vital. Thus, the use of Leader Standard Work brings a great value by helping to focus on processes, achieve positive results and avoid variations in work where it shouldn’t be.

 

Advantages of Leaders Standard Work

• Leaders get closer to the processes and people which they manage.
• Leaders can answer back swiftly to potential operational challenges and complications and track project progress
• Workforces/ Team members would know what to expect and see problem-solving as a collective effort.
• Leader Standard Work provides visual management of daily, weekly, and monthly jobs and responsibilities.
• Leader Standard Work ensures to optimise people, process and system utilisation
• Leader Standard Work prioritizes time for other critical BAU activities.
• Leader Standard Work supports clear expectations and duplicable results.

Swarandeep Kaur Juneja has provided the winning answer to this question by explaining LSW and its related benefits in details.