Leaders Standard Work For All To See

I received the above photo in an email from the following link http://beyondlean.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/making-leader-standard-w.... I thought it was a fantastic example of using Visual and Leaders Standard Work lean tools as countermeasures to a problem where the gap was Supervisors not following their daily standard work.

Go to the link to see the steps for creating the board and the benefits of making Leaders Standard Work visual for the entire facility to see. If your organization is having trouble with Supervisors/Team Leads performing the key tasks required each day, then making the tasks visual could do the trick. It not only allows the Managers and Sr Team Leaders see who is doing their work, but also allows the Value Added team members to hold their Supervisors accountable to do their Standard Work --- which they will.

Auburn Technical Assistance Center is working with an organization with this very issue --- I will advise at a later date after the experiment of having their Leaders Standard Work created and visual is complete.

Tags: Auburn, Healthcare Process Improvement, Healthcare Process Management, Leader, Leaders Standard Work, Lean Manufacturing, Standard, Visual, Work, alabama, More…continuous improvement, lean, training

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Comment by Robert (Bob) Petruska on July 11, 2011 at 11:03am: Hi Rick. Thanks for sharing this example of Leaders Standard work.

One of the items addressed in the blog was the influencing principle of "Consistency" (i.e. commitments made publicly are typically followed through). It also put some peer pressure into team accountability, by making it easier for the front line operators to nudge the leader to follow through.

Noticeably "Firefighting" is left out. In many organizations it seems that leaders are faced with a constant barrage of crises, so leaving this off means that either firefighting is not needed, or not part of the leaders job. As I think about this deeper, we all want to move our time from urgent/important quadrant to not urgent/important. On the journey we could post some metric about how much of the time is spent in firefighting vs. not urgent/important.

Another observation is that the leader has a great deal of communication going on (about half of the line items are all about communication). This is good news, and I wonder if this organization has some visual methods for communicating that you could share with the readers as well?

"Audit flow lines" seems like it points to use of a Gemba Walk which is also very good.

Please keep us updated on how your experiment goes. Thanks. Bob