Page 460 - The Toyota Way Fieldbook

430 THE TOYOTA WAY FIELDBOOK

Leadership from the Top, Middle, and Bottom

2
Change is impossible without effective leaders. But where in the organization
should those leaders be located? The answer is that leaders are needed at the
top, middle, and bottom. Let’s go into each of these levels, and then look at
what’s involved in becoming a lean teacher, or coach.
The Role of the Top

Behavior in the trenches of the organization is a reflection of the leadership of
the top. We saw in Chapter 11 that the leaders at Toyota are hands-on. They’re
on the floor or in the engineering offices or wherever the real action is. They
have learned the art of genchi genbutsu, understanding how to observe deeply
and see what is truly going on. Wherever they go, they are coaching and
teaching.
But like all leaders, they too must work through other people. In fact, this is
the definition of a leader—they have followers. We would not expect them to
do a lot of the detailed design or implementation. So what exactly is their role?
Figure 20-1 shows a typical structure for a lean transformation. Each of the
roles in the diagram is necessary, with the Executive Sponsor involved in two
aspects of the process. On the one hand, he or she provides the resources nec-
essary—resources that include but are not limited to money—and on the other
has all the sources of power available to make things happen.
Remember, this is a political process. There is always resistance to change.
There are people who will see their interests or the interests of their departments
threatened by the change. Let’s consider an example.
At one defense client that repairs aircraft, the labor hours of all repair workers
have to be charged to accounts. To get shop floor workers involved in lean proj-
ects, they had to be taken off of their normal work and assigned to teams to par-
ticipate in kaizen events. Implementation was aggressive, so a number of projects
were conducted in parallel involving dozens of workers. There was a lot of
pressure to get the aircraft out significantly faster to support the needs of the
customer. The results of the lean transformation were impressive and moving
this facility toward becoming the fastest in the business. The results were poten-
tially worth tens of millions of dollars. But in the meanwhile the workers’ time
was charged to a lean account, which was falling further and further into deficit.
An executive operating committee for the base was pressuring the head of the
plant to stop the lean activities. Under similar circumstances an engine repair
facility on that base had stopped lean events. This leader might have succumbed

2 Many of the ideas and figures in this section were derived from the work of Bill Costantino, for-
mer Toyota group leader and private consultant.