Leader Standard Work is becoming more commonplace and the standard for the development of a Lean Culture. It is extremely adaptable and found both in trade and professional services. It excels in experienced based professions but it may struggle in what I would call knowledge-based services. The problem is there are more knowledge-based jobs being created every day. The experience based jobs either get automated or outsourced. For more information on that subject, read Dan Pink’s, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
Since Lean is so intrinsically tied to standard work, many believe Lean cannot apply to their “Knowledge Based” occupation. In fact, it is often resisted in these circles.
When met with resistance, I have found that typically there is a good reason why. As I review most Leader Standard Work for knowledge workers, I still find them heavily laden with specific instructions and very results based focus. In Sales and Marketing (I am considering Sales and Marketing to be knowledge work) , you will see instructions such as make 25 calls, send out 15 e-mails, 3 blog posts a week, etc. On the other hand, I do see slack time allowed under the disguise of daily or weekly Kaizen.
Leader Standard Work will fizzle out quickly if you simply try to practice Leader Standard Work through Lean Training, coupled with your experience and try to become more proficient through iteration after iteration. It doesn’t work that way. In fact, it may take years, certainly months, to acquire the skills needed. What stops you is that you not only have to learn new skills but these skills and learning are not stagnant. They are in constant turmoil; developing, adapting and evolving while obsoleting the existing structure.
Many companies may fall short as a result of not creating the internal collaboration structure needed for learning. The organization must develop as a whole and this can only be accomplished by developing their personnel by providing the necessary resources and opportunities. We also need to promote individual differences. Instead of teaching the way to do some things, we may need to step back and determine the key points that are required, as Simon Sinek says the “Why” while leaving the how alone (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action).
What will drive Leader Standard Work is the “Why” more so than the “How”. The “Why” provides the clear strategic intent which will provide the fuel for Leader Standard Work. This analogy is wonderfully described in David Mann’s Book Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions, Second Edition
- Leader Standard Work – Engine
- Daily Accountability Process – Gas Pedal and Steering Wheel
- Visual Controls – Transmission
- Discipline – Fuel
When developing your Leader Standard work address these three items;
- Clarification – Minimum standard is explicit
- Commitment – Level of commitment is expected from the individual
- Connection – A path for support through conversation is provided.
Can your Leader Standard Work pass the 3 C Test?
Standardizing your work provides opportunity to spread it within your organization and make it easier for customers to go deeper into your organization for knowledge sharing. This provides a flood of new ideas for innovation and co-creation opportunities. But even more importantly it secures a vendor-customer relationship or partnership that is difficult for others to replicate.
The amount of Standard Work that you decide for your teams will differ from organization to organization and from team to team. Standard Work should only encompass part of your time. Knowledge workers should have a a fair amount of slack time built into their process, i.e. Google, 3M. On the other hand, just about every person wants some form of standard work. Most enjoy doing tasks that they are comfortable with and it gives them a sense of accomplishment when completed.
Standardizing your work provides opportunity to spread it within your organization and make it easier for customers to go deeper into your organization for knowledge sharing. This provides a flood of new ideas for innovation and co-creation opportunities. But even more importantly it secures a vendor-customer relationship or partnership that is difficult for others to replicate.
A perspective on Standard Work from Steve Bell (Steve and his partner Mike Orzen later published Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation):
But when you get right down to it the principles of Lean are the same. It’s about collaborative learning. It’s about speed. It’s about quality. It’s about waste reduction. Those basic principles are the same.
What he has concluded and what I have concluded is you need to create a framework for the people who are actually doing the work to come together, figure out what the work is to be done. Where’s the value? Where’s the waste? And iteratively, through experiments, find ways to do it better and better. Each time you learn. You go through a cycle of learning. You improve the process and at the same time you understand more about the subtleties about the process and that’s where the paradox of Lean emerges. As you’re standardizing something you’re also gaining insights into it which leads to creativity and innovation.
Many people react to standard work thinking that you’re just turning people into robots. What you’re actually doing is you’re helping people, removing the drudgery and the repetitiveness from the work, making the work flow more smoothly and quickly, which frees up peoples valuable time and energy to figure out ways to do the work better and to do new kinds of work.
I think that’s the real magic of Lean whether it’s in IT or any other industry. When you see a team really get it and start to think and act like a team with a focus on the customer and they own the product, they own the process, they own their relationship with the customer, then the role of management isn’t so much a directive role or a controlling role but the role of management is to help remove the obstacles in the teams way. That’s when you have high performance, self directing teams that really start to energize the company. When that happens that’s where the momentum comes from.
Password: Trilogy7
If you want execution, keep it simple!. From a business stand point, there are many more success stories, that are founded on simple, focused ideas, than complex ones. Lean is a very simple concept, it is a learn be doing approach. If you can master this, you will be in service design. It can be taught in 3 steps:
- Go and See the USER.
- Form a vision of where the USER wants to go.
- Visualize the USER’s decision process.
In practice, Lean Service Design is essentially a knowledge transfer system; it’s a training system on how to define knowledge gaps and close them. How you learn or develop this new
skill is the same way you are taught to become proficient at anything. It is how often you do something, not how much you do. As a result, the best way to learn is keep it simple (clarity), do it often (repetition/iteration) and make it manageable. In the Lean sense, make standard work visual and uncomplicated.
A great example of making something simple is the Seinfeld calendar. On the lifehacker blog , he described the calendar that Jerry Seinfeld used to make himself write:
“He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing; I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
The idea is to have a calendar for each action step. Write the task above it and start building your chain.
And yes, there is an app for this called Streaks!
This daily action builds habits. I encourage the Lean Engagement Teams that I work with to create daily habits through their reports used at the daily standup meeting. Going through their action plan and either answering a yes or no or maybe a number they start creating a daily plan something very simple. The secret is not to break the chain. After doing this for a while it becomes a habit and something you enjoy doing. It is like a checkmark on a checklist or moving the card on a Kanban to the “Done” Column. You could even equate it to a batter on a hitting streak and use an app.
Make no mistake about it; EXECUTION is what we are looking for from standard work.
If you execute, you can do anything. When a company has a clear mission, and people know how their individual mission fits into the big picture, everyone paddles in the same direction. —Stephen Cooper
The biggest influence on my ability to execute has been Stephen Covey’s, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It provided me a personal method to perform standard work. A later program developed by Franklin Covey was the The 4 Disciplines of Execution which I still listen to for reinforcement but without the context of the training. The actually four disciplines serve as a great guideline for execution:
- Focus on the Wildly Important: Human beings are wired to do only one thing at a time with excellence. The more we narrow our focus, the greater chance of achieving our goals with excellence.
- Create a Compelling Scoreboard: People play differently when they’re keeping score.
- Translate Lofty Goals into Specific Actions: To achieve goals you’ve never achieved before, you need to start doing things you’ve never done before. • Using an entrepreneurial
- Hold Each Other Accountable-All of the Time: Knowing others are counting on you raises your level of commitment.
These disciplines are what guides my own work and has allowed me to guide teams into higher levels of performance.
As I started my consulting path a few years back, I became a facilitator for the Get Clients Now – 28 Day Program. I always struggled with it somewhat because of the language used, appetizers, desserts, etc. but for the most part it provided a simple and concise action plan for assembling Wildly Important into Specific Actions into a Compelling Scoreboard (The Action Worksheet). When used with teams, it provides an excellent format for providing you a line of sight in daily stand-ups and weekly meetings. It was easily modified for individuals and organizations in Google docs for the teams that I was working with. As we all know, most sales efforts fall short in their ability to follow up which is at the core of the Get Clients Now Program. This outline became the core of standard work for my training programs.
Follow-through is the cornerstone of execution, and every leader who’s good at executing follows through religiously. Following through ensures that people are doing the things they committed to do. – Larry Bossidy
In my previous project management experience, I had found it was a matter of available resources that was the biggest inhibitor to actual execution. In most instances, thinking from a manufacturing or using GCN terminology a cook’s perspective, it was a missing tool or ingredient. When some has all the tools and/or material to do the job, they usually get the job done efficiently and at a high quality level. It holds true for sales and marketing. However, it always seemed to me that many action steps were started without the necessary resources available. The secret to what we needed to document in standard work was the needed resources to complete the action step and accept no workarounds.
In Scott Belsky’s (founder of Behance) book, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, he uses an approach called The Action Method. which has become my management planner of choice. It is extremely simple and highly intuitive for a single person and/or team. I use the paper, online and the app for my iPhone all in combination with very little of redundant work. What the Action Planner does is creates a systems that emphasizes action steps and having the supporting resources available. This is the essence of standard work for the Lean Engagement Team. Making the resources you are utilizing and highlighting what you are missing to the rest of the team, Team Coordinator and Value Stream Manager is the single most important part of the Daily Standup and Weekly Tactical. It allows work to flow.
I have found that most organizations prefer to customize and many still use Google Docs as the reporting method of choice. However, the point is not what tool you use. The point is mastering it so it takes little effort to make your work visible to the rest of the team. This line of sight is what makes teamwork possible. Both of these methods require little if any experience and more importantly can be completed quickly.
The typical daily stand-up goes like this:
- State the action item and report did you do it: yes or no
- If not, what stopped you? Was a resource missing?
- What I am going to do today. Am I missing any resources? Who can help (if so, meet afterwards)?
The biggest problem I have had in these daily standups is that the managers have a tendency to turn them into longer sessions. They want to manage. The idea behind a daily standup is for tactical purposes. It is meant to enable team members to carry out their actions; nothing more, nothing less. Managers if they are participating should be enablers of the actions or in Lean terms the role of servant leadership.
Standard work should be an enabler of innovation, not a hindrance. In a Business901 podcast with Terri Griffith, we took a look at a few of these principles and found out why it is so important to access where you are at before venturing into the unknown. In the premier show of Innovators Exchange, Tad Milbourn, senior product manager of Intuit Brainstorm, speaks with Terri Griffith, author and professor of Management at Santa Clara University. Tad and Terri discuss her new book, The Plugged-In Manager
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