WHAT IS LEADER STANDARD WORK?

These materials are from the book, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels. Enjoy the book, and invest in yourself by joining LLI’s online learning experience at https://LeanLeadership.guru/.

Following are the teaching objectives for this section:

Following are teaching objectives for this section:

1.     Explain how Toyota, even today, learns through the master-apprentice relationship.

2.     Illustrate Leader Standard Work (LSW).

3.     Provide an example of a daily round for a Lean Manager.

In Toyota, you're learning with a trainer who becomes the master and you are the apprentice.

This particular photo was taken at the Toyota plant in Texas; someone is teaching me how they taught problem-solving when they had people employed and they weren't making trucks and they were just teaching them every day.

 The mentor’s role is to challenge you, to challenge you to think, to challenge the way you act, and to give you assignments, and then to watch you carefully; much of the time the mentor is not giving you any feedback.

Then you struggle and eventually they will give you feedback and they'll give you a concrete assignment.

If you think about being a blacksmith or being a carpenter in the old days where your father might drop you off at the local blacksmith shop and turn you over to the master blacksmith and in a way you were the property of that master.

You do exactly as the master says, and eventually you will become a master blacksmith, so you can set up your own shop. Your progress depends upon that master; he's got complete control.

That kind of a relationship, common a few hundred years ago, never left Toyota; it's not as defined as I'm dropped off and you're my master, but it is expected that when you have a new job somebody will teach you, and it's usually your boss.

If you're on a special project, your teacher might be an expert at the Toyota Production System and they will teach you some aspect of TPS; that person is responsible for training and developing you, and you treat them as an apprentice would treat the master. 

LEADER STANDARDIZED WORK

Later there was a popular movement called leader standardized work and in many cases there was a simplistic assumption. We tend to think in terms of simple cause and effect.

With this project I expect a return on investment. In leader standardized work there is a Lean Leader, somebody who gives us standard work to perform; a lean leader will follow the standardized work.

Usually the standardized work involves going to Gemba and asking questions and observing. 

Leader standardized work refers to repetitive patterns of activities that represent the current best way of planning and controlling business processes.

So there is a part of every leader’s job that can be made routine. That repetitive percentage compared to the percentage that is unique is going to vary depending on the position. 

Basically as you go higher in the organization, more of what you do is react to unique circumstances and to know how to react properly.

The lower your station, the more of the job is routine. A team leader in Toyota would be an hourly employee who's given extra responsibilities, and they're off the line and they are responding for example to Andon pulls.

They pull a cord, a light goes on; they can be trained in a lot of detail about how to respond to an Andon pull.

When the light goes on, you become the object of attention; the stoplight is on you as a team leader.

The team member simply pulls a cord; he's done; he's called attention to the problem.

Now the spotlight is on the team leader who must jump into action. What do you do? Again, you can be trained in a fairly routine way even though every situation that you face on the line will be different.

What happens, for example, if there is a missing part?

What happens if the team member made a quality error?

How do you judge when you need to allow the line to stop versus when you pull the cord a second time and solve the problem while the car's moving down the line?

What do you do if the problem is too big for you and you have to call for help? 

So, defined routines work for those situations even though there is improvisation.

There are also routine things that you do as a team leader like check to see if the pulls themselves are within a quality range, for example, this a chalk on the chalk range within the acceptable range.

So you're making quality checks, and you're collecting data that's posted on the team meeting board.

So there are a lot of routine activities; there are things that you should look for before the shift starts; you come early as the team leader and everything should be set up right so that when the line starts, everything is ready to go.

So we're saying here that roughly 80% of the job can be taught and is fairly repetitive, and about 20% of situations are unique.

The machine may crash in a way that you've never seen before, and you have to be creative.

The group leader we're suggesting it's more like 50-50, the group leader is a first line supervisor.

As you go up to a Manager level maybe only 20% of what you do is repetitive and 80% is adapting to circumstances, adapting to people's needs. 

With leader standardized work, even if you're a manger and only 20% of your work is routine, if you can standardize that 20%, you don't have to really think about it, right?

That's 20% of one day's worth of work. Over a 5-day week of stuff that you can just do automatically and that's the part you want to standardized. 

Other parts of the job you need to learn with a mentor over many years in on-the-job development; you're learning the tacit parts of the job, the parts that can't be written down procedurally.

The tacit parts you learn through experience and dealing with more and more circumstances; and you develop and repertoire of skills that allow you to deal with employees that repeatedly don’t show up to work.

Perhaps a machine breaks down in a spectacular way that shuts down production for the whole day; perhaps the vendor misses a shipment.

You've dealt with similar problems many times before, but each situation is unique.

A problem may be similar to what you've done in the past, so you're developing a rapporteur of skills for the 80% and some very routine, specific repetitive work where you could actually write down the procedure.

WHAT IS LEADER STANDARD WORK?

George Trachilis: Working from the bottom of this diagram, it is the manager here, who you're showing as blue which means that you should standardized that 20% of the work.  If it's an assistant manager you should standardize about 25% of the activities, and for the group leader who leads about 5 to 8 team leaders; they should have about 50% of their work week set up as a routine or standard, right?

Jeff Liker: Right and then the white, the Team Leader's in white because the Team Leader's is not a formal manager. 

George Trachilis: Right

Jeff Liker: The team leader is an hourly worker but they also would have, they would have 80%. These are just rough numbers but they would have about 80% of the work would be quite a standard routing.

So you're trying to identify the repetitive portions of the job and for those repetitive portions, you are trying to standardize. Everyone who's in that job can be taught those routine aspects. The rest of the job they're going to learn through experience, and they've already been learning a lot of those skills that will allow them to deal with the sudden situations that are unique that they're facing constantly through the day.

Something might take four hours to do. Ten years later you're doing the job in 15 minutes because you have developed your own habits, your own routines for handling those things you couldn't identify.

A master chess player looks at a board, and he knows exactly what the situation is at a glance and he can start thinking about his moves.

He knows different kinds of moves and different strategies for situations at a glance.

The novice has to look at every piece and try to figure out all the different ways the opponent can move.

So the master chess player has a lot of templates and routines in his head, but if you try to write those down, it might require hundreds of pages and might not be worth doing.

 DAILY ROUND FOR LEADER STANDARD WORK

So this would be an example of a daily round; the plant manager is walking through the plant, and you'll see the president of the Toyota plant, who will make a daily walk and it is part of their routine; they do it every day unless there is an emergency.

The president may decide to do a deep dive for a work group and he will change groups every day.

Every place they go they're looking for certain things; they are focusing on something; for example, in HR it might be the hiring plant and they're going to be asking questions.

For Visual Management, they can see the status and it's much easier for the president to ask the right questions and to challenge the thinking of people. 

LEADER STANDARDIZED WORK IS NECESSARY

This is a necessary step until leaders become Lean leaders, until they've developed to where they just do this and they don't need it written down and they don't need it to become formal, written standardized work.

In the book we make a little disparaging analogy and say it's like training wheels on a bicycle. Training wheels will help you learn but at some point somebody's got to give you a push without the training wheels so that you're actually riding a bike. 

One-Minute Review

·        Toyota leaders still learn using the master-apprentice relationship.

·        An apprentice does exactly what the master says, and their advancement depends completely upon the master.

·        Leader Standardized Work is the least wasteful method of planning and controlling normal business processes.

·        Even if only 20% of your day is routine, it equates to one day a week.

·        If you can standardize the routine aspects of a job, they will be done more consistently, and you will be creative for the unique, non-routine tasks.

·        The unique parts of the job must be learned through experience.

·        The president of a Toyota plant does a daily walk.

·        Being able to see the status allows him to ask the right questions and challenge the thinking. 

*****

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George Trachilis, P.Eng., Co-founder & CEO, Lean Leadership Institute.