Implementation Guide
Leader Standard Work.
Leader standard work (LSW) is the set of recurring, checkable routines a leader runs to keep the daily management system alive: board checks, tier meetings, standard work observations, audits and coaching, written down with time budgets. It is coaching time at the process, not an inspection checklist. It is also the mechanism that lets the system survive vacations, promotions and bad quarters, because the routines belong to the role, not to the person currently in it.
What leader standard work is, and is not
Operators have standard work because their process is repeatable. Leaders have a repeatable process too: check the board, run the meeting, observe a standard, audit a zone, coach a person. Leader standard work writes that repeatable part down as a routine card: a one-page list of recurring tasks with frequencies and time budgets, visible at the board, checkable by the level above.
What it is not: a script for the whole day, and not an inspection checklist. A supervisor whose card fills every minute has no capacity left for the day's actual problems, and a card built around catching people produces exactly the defensive floor it deserves. The content of good LSW is overwhelmingly coaching and checking the process: watching real cycles against the standard, asking questions at the board, closing the loop on escalations. It is coaching time at the process, written down so it survives pressure.
Scope note: this page covers the leader routines themselves. The meeting cascade those routines protect has its own guide, tier meetings, and the surrounding operating system, boards plus meetings plus problem solving, is covered in lean daily management.
Where LSW sits in the transformation roadmap
On the TeamGuru deployment roadmap, leader standard work is its own practice in the Run stage, and it comes after daily management exists, because the routines are mostly about maintaining the boards, meetings and standards the earlier practices created. It runs in parallel with standard work and 5S, whose audits live inside the leader cards, and it feeds structured problem solving with what the checks surface.
- Before Daily Management
- You are here Leader Standard Work
- In parallel Standard Work & 5S
- After Structured Problem Solving
Why systems decay without it
Every daily management system is one leadership change from extinction unless its maintenance is explicit. That sounds dramatic until you run the three tests. The vacation test: does the tier meeting keep its standard for the two weeks the area manager is away? The promotion test: when the supervisor who built the board moves up, does the next one inherit routines or just a job title? The bad quarter test: when volume drops and everyone is firefighting, is coaching time the first thing sacrificed?
Systems that fail these tests were never systems; they were the personal habits of a few good leaders. Habits do not transfer. Routines written down with time budgets do, because the successor gets the card on day one, the boss can see whether the routines ran, and a bad quarter has to argue with a visible standard instead of quietly eating it. This is the real job of LSW: it converts the management system's maintenance from a personality trait into a property of the organization.
Do not start leader standard work when:
- There is no daily management system yet. LSW maintains a system; if there are no boards and no tier meetings, there is nothing to check and the card fills up with invented inspections. Build the daily rhythm first.
- Leaders' calendars are not protected. If meetings called from above routinely cannibalize floor time, the card becomes fiction by day three. Fix the calendar conflict before printing cards.
- The intent is surveillance, not coaching. If the plan is to feed completion data into performance ratings, stop: you will get perfectly ticked cards and an unmaintained system.
How to build a routine card
A routine card takes an afternoon to draft and two weeks to make honest. The sequence matters more than the template: derive the content from what the daily management system needs, let the leader write it, and make sure the boss is running one too.
Start from the system's needs, not the calendar
List what the daily management system requires to stay alive: which boards must be checked and when, which meetings must be run or attended, which standards and 5S zones need a recurring audit, which operators need coaching this quarter. The routine card is the maintenance schedule of the management system, so its content comes from the system, not from how the leader currently spends time.
Draft the card with the leader, not for them
The leader writes their own card against that list in a 30-minute working session, with someone keeping the format consistent. One page, each routine with a frequency and a time budget. A card handed down from the CI office gets complied with for a month; a card the leader wrote gets defended.
Pilot for two weeks, then cut
Every first draft is too full. Run it for two weeks, mark what was missed and why, then cut, retime and resequence. The test is a bad day: if the card cannot survive a breakdown morning, it is a wish list, not standard work.
Launch one level above the level you want to change
The common advice is supervisors first, because their day is the most repeatable. That is half right: their cards carry the most standard time, but a supervisor-only pilot fails the first week the area manager pulls them into unplanned meetings and never carries a card themselves. Start the pilot one level up: when supervisors get cards, their manager runs one from day one, and the content cascades upward, because each level's card exists largely to check and coach the level below.
Leave the rest of the day explicitly unscripted
The card covers the repeatable part of leadership. The remainder is for the day's actual problems, and it is planned free capacity, not slack. A card that schedules 100 percent of the day dies on contact with reality.
Three example routine cards
The cards below are illustrative but realistic, drawn for the same 450-person components manufacturer used across the transformation roadmap: 456 units per day, day shift at 6:00, tier 1 at 6:45, tier 2 at 7:15, tier 3 at 8:00. Notice the pattern as the level rises: fewer daily items, more auditing of the level below, and every card contains the routines that check someone else's routines.
Shift supervisor: the daily card
| Frequency | Routine | Time budget |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | Board and staffing check before tier 1: yesterday's numbers on the SQDIP board, safety scan of the line, coverage for absences confirmed | 6:15 to 6:40 |
| Daily | Run tier 1 at the team board: deviations, actions, escalations | 6:45 to 7:00 |
| Daily | Attend area tier 2, carry the team's escalations up and bring answers back | 7:15 to 7:35 |
| Daily | Two standard work observations: watch one full cycle each against the standard sheet, notes about the process, never the person | 2 x 15 min |
| Daily | One 5S zone check against the zone's photo standard, findings become actions | 10 min |
| Daily | Coach one operator: one skill from the training plan, questions before answers | 20 min |
| Daily | Shift close: today's actions closed or carried over with a reason, handover written for the next shift | 15 min |
About two and a quarter hours of named routines per shift. With recurring but variable work added, escalation responses, planned trainings, shift start and end, the structured share of a supervisor's day lands near 70 percent, and the rest is deliberately open.
Area or value stream manager
| Frequency | Routine | Time budget |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | Run tier 2: reds and escalations by exception; every new escalation leaves with an owner and a response time | 7:15 to 7:35 |
| Daily | Attend site tier 3, report by exception, carry decisions back down the same day | 8:00 to 8:30 |
| Weekly | Audit one tier 1 as a silent observer against the meeting checklist, then coach the facilitator afterward, never during the meeting | 30 min |
| Weekly | One themed gemba walk: one waste, one standard or one flow, ending with exactly one follow-up the walker owns | 45 min |
| Weekly | Escalation aging review: anything without an owner after 48 hours, or unanswered after a week, goes to tier 3 | 20 min |
| Weekly | Routine completion review with each supervisor: what was missed, why, and whether the card needs changing | 15 min |
About 50 minutes of fixed daily routines plus roughly two hours of weekly ones. The weekly items are the heart of the card: they are what keeps four tier 1 meetings honest without the manager attending all of them.
Plant manager
| Frequency | Routine | Time budget |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | Run tier 3: site trends, top escalations, decisions that need authority or money, priorities down | 8:00 to 8:30 |
| Weekly | One full cascade walk: attend a tier 1 at 6:45, follow one of its escalations through tier 2 and into tier 3 the same morning | 90 min |
| Weekly | Routine completion across areas reviewed at tier 3: misses treated as signals about the system, not verdicts on people | 10 min |
| Monthly | Audit the auditors: join one area manager's tier 1 audit, compare notes afterward, check that the checks are real | 60 min |
| Monthly | Revise own card: drop routines that no longer earn their time, add what the system now needs | 20 min |
The plant manager's card is the shortest and the most visible. When it slips, every level below learns what the real priorities are, which is why the weekly cascade walk is the one item that should survive any week.
How much of the day to standardize
The share of a leader's time that runs on standard work falls as the level rises, because judgment work grows. These figures count all recurring structured work, meetings, checks, observations, coaching and reviews, with the routine card as the checkable core.
| Level | Standard share | What fills it |
|---|---|---|
| Shift supervisor or team leader | Around 70 percent | Tier 1 and 2, board checks, standard work observations, 5S checks, coaching, handover |
| Area or value stream manager | Around half | Tier 2 and 3, tier 1 audits, themed gemba walks, escalation and completion reviews |
| Plant manager | Around 30 percent | Tier 3, cascade walks, audits of the audit layer, monthly reviews and card revisions |
Treat these as starting points, not law. Calibrate over the first quarter against what the misses tell you, and remember the goal was never a percentage: it is that the routines that keep the system alive are explicit, visible and checked.
Coaching without micromanaging
The fastest way to kill LSW is to run the routines as inspections. A supervisor who arrives at a station with a clipboard and leaves with a list of corrections has taught the crew to perform for the clipboard. Every observation on the card is about the process, never the person: the question is whether the standard is followable and followed, and a deviation is data about the standard as often as it is data about training.
The working posture is questions before answers, the same discipline that gemba walks formalize. Five behaviors keep the routine on the right side of the line:
- Say what you are there to see before you start watching. An unannounced observation reads as a trap, and a trapped operator shows you a performance, not the process.
- Watch a full cycle before saying anything. Fragments produce verdicts; whole cycles produce questions.
- Ask what gets in the operator's way, and write the answer down where they can see it become an action.
- Correct nothing mid-cycle except a safety risk. Everything else waits for the standard sheet and a conversation.
- Leave one question behind, not five instructions. The routine is repeatable; the teaching compounds.
Tracking completion honestly
Completion must be visible, or the practice quietly dissolves: the card lives at the board or in a shared system, ticked as the day goes, readable by anyone. Misses are reviewed weekly one level up and across the site at tier 3, and the question is always diagnostic: what displaced the routine? A calendar conflict points at the meeting culture, chronic overload points at a card that needs cutting, and a pattern of one level's misses usually means the level above is consuming their time.
Two rules keep the data honest. First, completion is never weaponized: the moment ticks feed performance ratings, every card turns green and the signal dies. Second, distrust perfection: sustained 100 percent completion means the card is too easy or the ticks are fiction. A healthy card runs at roughly 80 to 90 percent, with the misses explained and the card revised when the same miss repeats.
Common failure modes
LSW rarely fails at launch. It fails in month three, in four predictable ways, and each has a countermeasure that belongs in the design rather than in a rescue effort.
Cards written by the CI office
The format is beautiful and the ownership is zero. Leaders comply for a month, then the cards migrate to a drawer. The countermeasure is authorship: the leader drafts, the CI office only keeps the format consistent and asks whether the system's needs are covered.
The 100 percent scripted day
A card that plans every minute collapses on the first breakdown, and one visible collapse discredits the whole practice. Standard work covers the repeatable part of the role; the unscripted remainder is where the day's real problems get worked, and it is protected on purpose.
Checklist theater
Ticks appear, observations do not. The tell is a check that never finds anything: that item is either a solved problem to retire or a fiction to confront. Audit the auditors monthly and ask about the last finding, not the last tick.
No revision in a year
A card that has not changed in a year is not being used, because the system under it has changed. Revision is part of the routine itself: each leader reviews their own card monthly and retires items the way 5S retires unused tools.
What happens next
Once the cards run, they become the sustain mechanism for everything built before them. The weekly zone checks and observation routines are what keep 5S and standardized work from decaying into laminated history, and as the plant matures, the audit items on the cards grow into a full layered process audit program. What the checks surface, repeat deviations, standards that cannot be followed, coaching gaps, feeds structured problem solving, the next practice on the roadmap.
The practical burden of LSW is scheduling and visibility: dozens of leaders, each with daily, weekly and monthly routines, findings that must become actions, completion that must be honest across three levels. This is where TeamGuru carries the practice: the leader standard work use case runs the cards as scheduled checklists, so each routine appears when it is due, findings turn into owned actions, and completion is visible at tier 3 without anyone compiling it.
