We Standardized the Work. Let’s Standardize the Leaders.

Distribution centers have spent decades engineering frontline work down to every 15 minutes of a shift. The people leading that work rarely get the same rigor. Most DC supervisors and operations managers get a title, a team, and a “good luck.”

One of us got exactly that. Before joining Connors Group, Jordan was a lean manufacturing engineer until his plant manager stopped by on a Friday and told him that on Monday he’d be running shop operations: 67 people, three shifts, in the middle of COVID.

The first weeks were firefighting. What got him through it was a simple structure for his day: when to check in with the third shift, when to build the staffing plan, when to walk the floor and coach. He didn’t have a name for it yet, but it was leader standard work.

When every improvement becomes the new standard

Leader standard work is a set of management routines: the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks we want leaders to execute consistently.

Most companies skip it and jump straight to continuous improvement. A district manager likes a process in one store and posts it to the region as the “new way.” A root cause on a DC’s Gemba board becomes one more thing a supervisor has to do today. Each fix becomes the new standard, the last one quietly drops off, and soon there is no standard at all. Multiply that across a network and you get 30 sites improving locally with no shared baseline to compare against: 30 versions of the truth.

The cost shows up fast. One client onboarding its 30th-plus distribution center saw go-live slip by more than a year. A new inbound supervisor, a role that should be identical in every DC, was trained by five or six supervisors from other facilities and learned the job six different ways. With turnover this high, that knowledge can’t pass down informally anymore.

The hidden cost of a full plate

Frontline leaders are rarely hourly, so nobody pays overtime when their task list grows. Leaders end up working 12- and 13-hour days, which drives turnover. (One client estimated the cost of turnover at $30K or more.) And the work that matters most gets squeezed out. At one distribution client running a labor management system, frontline leaders spent 75% or more of their time on administrative tasks.

So the first step is subtraction. Look at every task a leader does and ask whether it links to a KPI. If it doesn’t, question it. If it needs doing (but not by a supervisor), move it to a clerk or admin role. The point is to carve out capacity for the work that drives results.

From a static list to the right next action

We think of the path as crawl, walk, run. Crawl is defining leader standard work, even in a spreadsheet. Walk is digitizing it so completion is visible. The point isn’t to punish anyone; it’s to see which tasks aren’t getting done, and why. The first version of LSW is never the last, but it gives every future improvement a baseline to beat.

In crawl and walk, the list is still static: “do 10 coaching sessions a week.” Checking that box doesn’t guarantee the right conversation, and the data behind a good one is hard to get.

Run is where the standard starts telling leaders where to spend their day. Instead of “do 10 coachings,” a supervisor hears “coach this person, because they’re coming back from break late and it’s dragging their rate.”

Instead of auditing 2% of outbound pallets, check the one at door 10 that was built suspiciously fast. Instead of a fixed quota of cycle counts, the team focuses on where accuracy is slipping. Newly promoted DC supervisors ramp faster, and tenured ones get to what matters sooner.

The day is won or lost with frontline leaders

Most organizations have never defined how a leader should run the DC day-to-day, let alone standardized it across the network. The focus we’ve put on frontline workers, from labor standards to methods to training, needs to reach the people leading them.

A standard also makes honesty possible. One attendee observed that corporate visits are rarely honest, because teams stage what leadership wants to see. Jordan saw the alternative at a former employer undergoing a CEO transition, where red became the new green: “don’t show me that everything’s fine, show me the problem and what you’re doing about it.” When every site shares a baseline, that conversation gets easier to have.

Watch the full webinar: 30 Versions of the Truth: Why Frontline Leadership Needs a Standard