DEVELOPING PEOPLE

These materials are from Jeffrey K. Liker and the book, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels.

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The teaching objectives for this section are the following:

1.     Identify the 3rd P of the Toyota Way.

2.     Describe the type of investment needed in People and Partners.

3.     Identify what is mean by Problem Solving.

Here we show a pyramid that I developed; again Toyota has a house; I developed a pyramid. We started with a foundation describing the way you think about a company; it's long term; you're building something great as an enterprise; you're doing it through great processes that cut across departments, and you focus on what the customer wants.

The processes, unfortunately, are not physical things that run themselves; even if you have an automated process; you need to constantly monitor, check, adjust that process; you need to improve how it operates, and that requires ingenuity and that is where people come in. 

I originally had four Ps with people on the third level and a Toyota executive looked at it and he asked,” Where are our partners?” I said, “Well they are people, too.” He said, “Well, we have a really special focus on how we deal with our outside partners whether they are part suppliers or equipment vendors or lawyers or dealers; there are a bunch of independent businesses out there and they are just as important to our success as people who work in our company”

He suggested that I should consider partners in addition to the people I think of as their employees. What you end up doing with both groups, people & partners, is instilling this value of respect, which as I said is challenging and growing people?not simply treating people nicely.

That suggestion means that, if you show respect, even the outside partners are getting better, and I give an example in The Toyota Way. Toward the end of the book a lawyer, who won Phoenix Man of the Year, had a growing legal company that was performing wonderfully. He personally became man of the year because he worked to build a foundation for finding a new treatment for cancer, and he gives Toyota the credit for how he rebuilt himself as a person by working with a company. He said he never really understood how to be a lawyer until he worked with Toyota. So even a lawyer is learning from that interaction. You need to invest in people and partners to a degree that I find very unusual in most companies. 

George Trachilis: 

“Jeff let me ask you, you said it was usual for most companies to do it that way. What do you find so unusual about that?”

Jeff Liker: “Okay so good question. The question is what's unusual? Doesn't every company want great people, exceptional people committed to the company?”

The answer is yes, and I don't think you can find a mission and value statement that doesn't say that. Then, you need to look inside the company at what they actually do, and that is part of the story of the Toyota Leadership Book. What does Toyota actually do to invest in people? 

The typical company sends people to training, and they count the investment in people in terms of units of training. If you have forty hours of training, you're better trained than if you had ten hours of training. 

In Toyota they never believe that; they always believe that what really matters is not the hours of training, but what is important is what people learn, and what they need to learn is a way of thinking that's very rigorous, and they also need to learn how to do things; they need to learn skills. One thing we know about learning is that you don't learn skills and you don't fundamentally change your way of thinking by sitting in a classroom.

The worst possible environment for developing skill is in a classroom. The best possible environment is at the Gemba. If you want to learn golf, you don't sit in a nice air-conditioned hotel and watch the instructor swing a club. You go to the driving range of a golf course, the Gemba, and you hit a lot of balls. 

Toyota's view is that almost all important learning happens on the job; they use the term OJD or on the job development. To give people a framework and a push, they will do a little bit of training in a classroom and then immediately hit the Gemba. Then, you have some intensive learning; if it's a formal structured course, you do something at the Gemba to improve a process, for example.

Then you are monitored and coached continually after that; to reinforce that training and you continue to teach the next lesson, the next skill, the next lesson, the next skill. Learning itself becomes a continuous process.

Now I work with a lot of companies and they will say we have a Lean department, and we hired these people or we picked people from the company and they've gone to some Lean training at some university or association. They are certified; they all have black belts, so they're Six Sigma certified; but we want them to get additional training in higher level skills of Lean Six Sigma. I would say to them almost all the learning that's going to matter to them comes by doing; they have to actually do projects, and the bigger the scope of the project is, for example, if it's a value stream, it's going to be a lot more challenging than if they developed standardized work for an individual workstation.

Even developing the standardized work for the individual station is a big skill; you can get deeper and deeper and deeper in understanding standardized work, so you could spend your whole life on that. Ultimately, they have to learn those individual skills, and they also have to learn the bigger picture of how you get a group of people together, get them to work collaboratively; you coach the leader so that they can lead cross-functional cooperation processes.

There are many, many skills; I would say we'll do a little bit of training, but instead of doing five days, is it possible that we do two hours and spread it over the whole year. Meaning, two hours a week over the whole year. No, that's not possible. I would ask, “Why is it not possible?” Because we can't get people together for that long, or for that short a time in a cost-effective way.

“Well, what if we go to where they are and small groups meet in the local area, and then we'll work on projects, and we will come back and check?” Well, they say, “That's too expensive because we have to pay for your time and travel.” 

So what can we do? They immediately reply with, “Can you do a five-day course?” Knowing this is the worst case scenario, my reply is, “What if we do a two-and-a-half-day course and the students can do something at the Gemba on their own, and two weeks later, we'll do another two-and-a-half-day course?” Okay we can manage that.

 We end up with as an incredible compromise compared to what we know is the right way to learn, and we've seen this right way applied within Toyota. Inevitably we end up with a tiny training program instead of training people the right way which is ongoing coaching, doing, trying, reflecting, learning. 

The final P is problem-solving and what Toyota calls Kaizen is problem-solving, continuous improvement. Toyota talks about Genchi Genbutsu, which is understanding the actual situation?absolutely critical to problem-solving. Toyota talks about True North -- that gives you the vision for where you want to go in your process; you want to get closer and closer to a perfect process, and that really becomes the creative focus of everybody in the company. That is, how we solve problems.

If you're designing the next generation fuel efficient car and trying to figure out how you make hydrogen fuel cells practical and cost effective, you have to solve a series of problems. Or perhaps you're trying to figure out how to make a worker more productive by the way you present parts better to that worker; there is a whole series of problems just associated with that.

We call that the dynamic of The Toyota Way because the way you get from the current state to a better state is through problem-solving.

The underlying philosophy of problem-solving is what Toyota learned from Dr. Deming in the 1960s, and it involved the following: plan, do, check, act or plan, do, check, adjust or some call it plan, do, check, learn. In Japan it was called the Deming wheel. It continually rotates, it continually moves, and you're continually planning in advance of doing and then after you're doing, you're checking what happened as a result of doing. You look at how results relate to the plan, and then, based on the check, you're making adjustments; you're taking further actions. That includes identifying the next problem to work on, which leads to planning again. 

 One Minute review

·        Processes require ingenuity and that is where People come in.

·        Partners are grouped into the 3rd P because of how important they are.

·        What a typical company does to invest in people is send them to training.

·        The best possible environment for developing skill is at the Gemba (the place where value is added).

·        The creative focus for everyone in the company should be centered around the question, How do we solve problems?

·        The underlying philosophy of Problem Solving comes from Dr. Deming in the 1960’s.

·        Plan – Do - Check – Adjust (PDCA) is the dynamic of the Toyota Way.

·        PDCA is a continual process for problem solving.

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