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

THE TOYOTA WAY to LEAN LEADERSHIP

ACHIEVING AND SUSTAINING EXCELLENCE THROUGH

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

JEFFREY K. LIKER
GARY L. CONVIS

Copyright 2012 by Jeffrey K. Liker and Gary L. Convis. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-178079-7
MHID: 0-07-178079-3

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To my son Jesse, whose deep insight and sage advice shaped the entire theme of this book.

Jeff Liker

To my wife, Deborah, who has been my strongest supporter throughout our wonderful life journey together.

Gary Convis

It is a bit difficult for outsiders to understand how precious the Toyota Way is within our company and the challenges of growing leaders who live our values. It is a constant journey to find new and better ways to develop Toyota leaders. For this reason I am pleased that Gary Convis and Dr. Jeffrey Liker chose to write this book. I knew Gary well when he was a great leader at NUMMI, and I had the opportunity to work with him. This was a period of intense learning for Toyota about how to teach our culture to others brought in from the outside. Dr. Liker has devoted himself to deeply understanding our way from the outside. I am really very impressed when I read his books by how well he explains the way we think.

In a speech I made shortly after becoming president in 2009 I vowed to be closest to the gemba. Whenever there are real objects there is a gemba. When customers drive our cars the gemba is how they are using our products and what works for them and what causes them difficulties. As the current leader of the company I must model the behavior I expect from others. Going to the gemba means observing firsthand how our products are being designed, built, used, and what problems we have. There are always problems because we are never perfect. The only way we can really understand the problems is at the gemba.

This takes me to the role of leadership at Toyota, the subject of this book. At Toyota we have always invested heavily in developing leaders who understand and live the principles and values of the company. We want our DNA to be encoded in every leader and every team member at every level of the company. We expect greatness from all of our people. We expect them to accept and conquer challenges that may seem overwhelming at first glance. The greatness in people comes out only when they are led by great leaders. We are all growing and learning, and we all need teachers and coaches to help guide us. We say at Toyota that every leader is a teacher developing the next generation of leaders. This is their most important job.

A real irony is that respect for people requires that people feel the pain of critical feedback. When team members share with us the results of their improvement activities we always say show us the bad news first. What is it you still have problems with? If we do not give people accurate feedback based on real behavior they are not growing and we are not respecting them. The job of a leader is not to put them in positions to fail, but to put them in challenging positions where they must work hard to succeed and still see how they could have been even better. Our goal is for every Toyota team member from the worker on the production floor to our most senior executives to be working to continuously improve themselves. We all need sensei who will guide us to the next level of achievement. I personally still have many sensei teaching me.

The explanation that Gary and Dr. Liker give of how we develop leaders is yet another opportunity for us in Toyota to reflect and learn. I hope their book gives you some ideas of value for you personally and your company.

Akio Toyoda
President, Toyota Motor Corporation

This book is about making lean leaders, and it unabashedly uses Toyota as the model par excellence for lean leadership. We believe that the biggest gap in capabilities in the lean movement, and the root cause of the failure of many lean programs, is in leadership. As youll see through the course of the book, lean leadership is quite different from the typical leadership models and managerial styles of Western companies (American or European)or, for that matter, of most Japanese companies.