When was the last time you actually knew how loaded your team was?
Not felt it. Not guessed it. Knew it… The way you know your line utilization on a Tuesday morning.
If you can’t answer that, keep reading.
The Problem
This goes back to 2008 for me.
I was running operations at Ultra Seating Inc. My team was constantly bombarded with Project requests from every direction: new products, new customers, capacity expansions, process improvements. All seemed legitimate. All were urgent to someone.
And I had no system to say yes or no. Decisions were based on gut feel and goodwill.
I could see exactly how loaded my production line was. I had utilization data, cycle times, buffer capacity. I could tell you at any point in the day whether we had room to accept a rush order or not.
But for my people? For myself? We were running on optimism and overtime.
What I needed was a framework. Something that could objectively show how different people were loaded, how much buffer they actually had, and whether saying yes to the next request was a reasonable decision or a slow-motion capacity failure.
Nothing like that existed for leaders. So I started building one.
The Early Solution
What I built then was rough. But the logic was sound.
Apply the same thinking you use on the production floor to the people running it.
Not as a wellness initiative. Not as a work-life balance program. As an engineering problem with an engineering solution.
If you wouldn’t run a machine at 110% utilization indefinitely and expect it to perform, why are you running your leaders that way?
That question sat with me for fifteen years.
The Framework
Leadership Capacity Engineering is the answer I eventually built.
It applies Toyota Production System principles, specifically the Muri → Mura → Muda sequence validated by TPS practitioners, to how operations leaders manage their own capacity.
The closest thing I found when I started was the Leaders Standard Work(LSW). But no guide was available to deploy it as a system throughout your team. So I started developing it. It evolved as I tried to solve the problems my team and I faced.
Over time, it became a set of tools selected for the situation, but the philosophy remained the same. Focus on people first, then process and the product would fall into place naturally.
The tools are the ones you already know. Value stream mapping. Standard work. Buffer capacity engineering. The difference is the application. Not your production system. You.
The Muri-first sequence matters here just as much as it does on the floor. You cannot stabilize an overloaded system by adding standard work to it. Overburden gets addressed first. Then variation. Then waste. In that order.
Most leaders are trying to optimize a system that is still overloaded. That is why the improvements don’t hold.
Why LCE Exists
I’ve spent twenty years in manufacturing operations: Ultra Seating, Pulse Industrial, E-Zinc with TSSC. I’ve seen what happens when leaders run without a buffer. I’ve been that leader.
The quiet erosion is always the same. Coaching your team disappears first. Strategic thinking disappears next. What’s left is an expensive reactive resource doing work that shouldn’t be on their plate and calling it dedication.
It isn’t dedication. It’s a capacity failure with a predictable sequence and a preventable outcome.
That’s what LCE exists to address.
Not to make you slower. Not to make you softer. To make your and your team’s throughput sustainable.
Here’s the diagnostic question I ask every operations leader I work with:
If your three most disruptive weeks of the last quarter happened simultaneously, would your system have held?
If the answer is no, you already know what needs to be engineered.
Start Here
The Leadership Capacity Diagnostic takes five minutes. It will show you your current utilization state and where the overburden is hiding.
Capacity assessment for manufacturing & operations leaders. 20 questions(Excel File). Results in under 5 minutes.