Leader Standard Work Evolution

As improvements take hold, Leader Standard Work must evolve so that Leadership conversations are in tune with current priorities across the organisation to maintain a creative pressure for improvement and a strong sense of purpose. Here is how to do that through the TPM Excellence Programme.

2 min read

Local leaders are crucial in raising operational effectiveness which is why Leader Standard Work is such important lever to reinforce:

Compliance with equipment condition standards and process control parameters.
Collection and use of feedback to simplify and improve work routines, making them easy to do right, difficult to do wrong, and simple to teach. A key driver in reducing over 80% of unplanned downtime causes.

As improvements take hold, Leader Standard Work must evolve so that:

Leadership conversations are in tune with current priorities across the organisation.
Resources are focused where they create the greatest value.
The creative pressure for improvement translates into urgency, clarity, and a strong sense of purpose.

Without this structured evolution, organisations risk:

Disconnected initiatives competing for attention.
Local fixes that fail to address systemic root causes.
Limited visibility of hidden constraints that block sustainable progress.

Evolving Leader Standard Work

The TPM Excellence programme provides a clear set of benchmarks that guide Leader Standard Work development as capabilities mature over the improvement journey:

Refine Control Philosophies
- Action: Refine control methods and standards.
- Outcome: Improved critical asset reliability through a disciplined review of current philosophies.
Reduce Sources of Accelerated Wear
- Action: Deep equipment cleaning and developing asset care routines to maintain condition standards.
- Outcome: Reduction in wear-related losses through stronger work control.
Prevent Misoperation
- Action: Apply troubleshooting approaches to raise team skill levels.
- Outcome: Stronger abnormal condition management and systematic capture of lessons learned.
Task Transfer
- Action: Systematise access to tools, information, and routine tasks.
- Outcome: Development of frontline team self-management capabilities.
Delegate a Focused Improvement Agenda
- Action: Create environments that sustain optimal working conditions.
- Outcome: Frontline ownership of continuous improvement, with natural pull from the shop floor.

Making it Happen

The TPM Excellence programme incorporates a series of coaching plans to develop front line team capabilities as set out in table 1 below. These coaching plans also guide the development of Leader Standard Work and provide a framework for team based recognition as teams demonstrate each set of competences.

Team Review and Coaching (TRaC) Plans

1A. Maintain basic conditions: Able to reduce accelerated wear and set standards to sustain basic conditions
1B. Prevent mis operation: Able to simplify complex processes to make it easy to do right, and easy to learn:
2A/2B: Enhance process control: Reduce need for technical judgement. Able to run trials, enhance process control, upgrade visual indicators, transfer routine tasks to front line team.
3A/3B. Improve operability and maintainability: Able to systematically reduce the number of unplanned and then planned interventions
4A/4B. Deliver new value from operations: Able to deliver a step change in process precision, material yield and responsiveness to shifts in customer demand.

Why This Matters

Through TPM Excellence, Leader Standard Work becomes more than a checklist: it becomes part of a leadership system that coaches front line teams, builds capability at every level, and ensures that improvements are sustainable.

This approach:

Embeds best practice into daily routines.
Makes correct methods easy to follow and errors difficult to make.
Reduces unplanned interventions, freeing up leadership focus for team development and higher-level problem solving.

The result is a manufacturing environment where:

Operational performance is consistently reliable.
Continuous improvement becomes part of the organisational DNA.
Teams are empowered to drive sustainable gains and systemic problem-solving.

Conclusion

By developing leadership, planning, and execution capabilities grounded in real-time operational data, TPM Excellence accelerates performance improvements, delivers sustainable gains, and builds ownership of business problems where they happen.