Leader Standard Work (LSW)
Chaos Theory
The butterfly effect: This effect grants the power to cause a hurricane in China by a butterfly flapping it’s wings in New Mexico.
My Alternative Chaos Theory
The butterfly effect: This effect grants the power to a boss who constantly flits from one focus area to another to cause chaos for the staff within their own organisation.
Standard work, structured approaches, consistency of execution is not limited to those creating value by actually doing the work. I would hypothesise that a leader who has structure to their work and tasks can both enable that value creation and add further value to their people, their product and to their customers.
At some point you will have worked for a leader:
? Who flits from one focus area to another and leaves you confused as whether what you are currently working on is still the right work.
? Who you can never get hold of, or who only interacts with you when there is an issue.
? Who seems to spend all of their time ‘managing’ the day-2-day, rather than ‘leading’ team development and process improvement.
If you don’t recognise these traits, then either you are super lucky or that boss is in fact you.
Leader Standard Work (LSW) is a core concept and a key lever to Continuous Improvement by delivering consistent, reliable results every day. LSW helps by reducing firefighting and driving discipline and accountability. It applies to leaders at all levels, no matter how varied and creative they think their day is. It is important to remember that LSW is thus not a tool, but a system to structure how you manage the work, how you develop your people and how you improve your processes.
To get from The Plan to The Outcomes, LSW addresses:
? All of the business, people and improvement tasks that need to happen
? Whilst also creating space for the inevitable ‘inbounds’ that a leader will have to deal with in the whirlwind of their day.
The trick is of course to ensure that the urgency of the latter is not allowed to displace the importance of the former.
The 20+ leaders that I have talked to about this in the last two months and who are redefining their own approaches to better achieve this balance have, without exception, fed back to me two key observations:
1. This really works, because they have never felt so in control
2. It’s hard work and has required a substantial amount of personnel discipline to make it stick
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There is no shortage of ways to take yourself or your leaders through this process, but the only ones I use must at least contain the following basic steps:
? Understand the role of the leader in question
? Be clear on what are the most impactful aspects of their role which turn plans into outcomes
? Perform a current state data capture of where they spend each hour of the day
? Analyse this data against what their role ‘should be doing’
? Agree what is value-add and what is non value-add
? Determine what percentage of their day they can structure and stick to (20% or 80%?)
? Build in the value-add work up to the agreed percentage
? Place this desired future state into their diary, calendar or planner
? Agree a way to measure daily success of this new schedule
? Agree which stakeholders need to be informed so they can support their future state
? Run a 4-week trial of this future state (and ensure they score themselves every day)
? Review the trial and see if this schedule is the new current state, or if refinement is required
The first few steps are often skipped, but that misses the point that the main benefits of LSW are primarily about engagement and being sufficiently connected to turn business goals into reliable business outcomes. It is also about being more effective and feeling more satisfied as we know we are working on the right things. So yes, you are managing your calendar, but it’s not just about managing calendars!
I have yet to work with a leader who, by following the above and sticking to it with discipline, does not gain time and control back to their working lives and by inference makes the lives of their team just that little bit less chaotic too.
Please get in touch if you have had similar successes in this area, and let me know any additional observations or steps that you take; I’d love to refine my approach further. If on the other hand LSW is something you have never been exposed to, then please reach out as I’d be only too happy to assist.