What teams can learn from 'Oh what a feeling?!'
You said it didn't you...you said 'Toyota!'
When I was growing up, I asked my dad what his dream car was. He said a ‘Toyota’. I said really dad? Above a Lambo? Above a G-Wagon? Yep - the allure of a reliable, visually ‘ok’ to look at, and affordable cost to maintain, was held above the impracticality of anything else.
The Toyota Production System (TPS) was created to maximise efficiency and eliminate waste in the allocation of resources (sounds a bit close to home?).
The system is grounded on two pillars:
Just-in-time: Make only what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount that is needed
Jidoka: Automation with a human touch
You can read more about the TPS here but instead of making this a Toyota history lesson, I wanted to go through some cool principles we can apply from TPS to our teams & companies. But before we do, here’s a random cheesy old school Toyota ad.
Ok back to it….principles, and how we can apply it with our businesses and teams.
Base key decisions on a long term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term goals. Starts with leadership, but even if doing something (or avoiding something) means compromising on ‘what the business wants right now’, having the bigger picture in mind will help everyone stay on course.
Kaizen (continuous improvement): Improve processes, systems and operations continuously. This means that when you set in place plans, operating rhythms & frameworks, be flexible enough to change it if it’s stalling your long term vision.
Heijunka (Level out the workload): Eliminate ‘waste’ in processes, and reduce (and potentially eliminate) overburden to people in your teams. This is the overburden of responsibilities btw and not tasks (before y’all go screaming about ‘I got 1,000 things on my plate’).
Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right at the first time: Aim to get outcomes right as solutions are built.
Standardized tasks are the foundation for continuous improvements & employee empowerment: Creativity is not overrated. But capturing accumulated learning about a process, and standardizing this, then allows creative & individual expression to improve upon the standard. Learned this in Finance….told someone to get creative with improving a process, when there was no standard process to begin with (my bad!).
Grow leaders who deeply understand the work, live the philosophy & teach others: Developing exceptional people & teams who buy-in to the company goals & philosophy is critical to growth & trust in the business.
Gemba (see for yourself): Solve problems and improve processes by going to the source and personally observing and verifying data, rather than theorizing on the basis of what other people (or the computer screen) tell you.
Nemawashi (Consider all alternatives before going down a path): Make decisions slowly by consensus (use cross functional teams), thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly.
Hansei & Kaizen (Learning & Improving): Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvements (Kaizen).
Since those days chatting to my dad about why our next family car shouldn’t be a Toyota, I’ve since come to realise that Toyota don't just make cars that never breakdown, they also make systems that pass the mechanic test!
Wouldn’t it be cool if we could use the above principles to say the same about our teams?