The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development by Jeffrey Liker

Author:Jeffrey Liker [Liker, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2011-11-10T14:00:00+00:00

Kaizen and Leadership

Traditional American leadership models focus on an executive as a visionary, or “change agent,” who then drives change through an organization by force of will. Even “enlightened” leadership theory focuses on how to convince employees to sign on to the leader’s vision. What happens in Toyota leadership is radically different and is the only way to generate the kind of continuous improvement that is necessary for lean. Gary didn’t have a complete vision for minomi at TMMK that he wanted to convince V.J. and his team to get excited about. He saw possibilities, but from there, he turned over leadership to the group—those at the gemba—and asked them to figure out the vision that was right for TMMK and evolve it through planning, doing, checking, and acting—PDCA. As a result, V.J. and his team didn’t slavishly follow Central Motors. Because of Gary’s trust and his willingness to allow V.J. and other group leaders to really lead, they had the passion and the drive to continually improve, innovate, and solve problems. The end result far exceeded Gary’s initial expectations of what minomi could do for TMMK; in fact, there is no way that Gary, or anyone else who was that far removed from the gemba, could have anticipated all the different little innovations that would be needed along the way if minomi was to amount to anything other than a small experiment.

None of these innovations and improvements could have been driven from the top. But that doesn’t mean that senior leadership doesn’t have any role to play. Gary played a key role in supporting the daily kaizen activity needed to implement minomi. He was not involved on a day-to-day basis, and he certainly was not telling the team members and group leaders what to do. But he was coaching them and encouraging them, spending a great deal of time reviewing their work and asking questions, reinforcing how valuable their accomplishments were, and pushing them to even more improvement—adding energy to the system. As V.J. explained: “It is not every company that would have the president come down to the floor every month and review our work, ask questions, and support our imagination. The meetings with Gary always inspired us to do more.”

Organizational Structure Based on Work Groups

We opened this chapter with a quotation from Peter Drucker about the inevitable failure of any management system that depends on superhuman leaders. Part of the intent in telling the minomi story is to illustrate that large-scale change and dramatic improvement can happen from the bottom up without requiring such superheroes. V.J. and his team accomplished extraordinary things, but they were not extraordinary in and of themselves. Perhaps what is most extraordinary is Toyota’s investment in and trust of group leaders and team leaders. This investment is most clearly seen in the work group structure, without which daily kaizen would be impossible.

The fundamental organizational unit in Toyota is the work group. There are work groups in Engineering, Sales, Finance, Service Parts, Logistics, and Marketing.

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