By Katie Anderson, Shingo Publication Recipient Author
In many organizations, the predominant culture emphasizes pursuing outcomes and deliverables as paramount. This relentless focus on profit, efficiency, and growth places a disproportionate emphasis on short-term results. Companies often overlook the development and contributions of employees, which is a critical component in achieving successful results.
When pursuing business success, we have it backward by focusing on the outputs rather than the inputs.
While leaders want and need business results to deliver value to customers, to achieve those outputs, they should instead focus their attention on how to create those results: the systems that embody the behaviors that will foster a culture of learning. The Shingo Model™ emphasizes that to achieve long-term success and organizational excellence, leaders should focus on people, learning, and behaviors.
Toyota Got It Right
In my book Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn, I show how Toyota Motor Corporation had a different focus from most companies to get it right and illustrate a leadership framework for how you can, too.
My discussions with Isao Yoshino, a 40-year leader at Toyota, over the past decade reveal a profound truth: the core of Toyota's success is its unwavering commitment to people and creating conditions for them to contribute and grow. In doing so, Toyota has become the standard of an organizational culture of excellence that companies around the world try to emulate.
Yoshino asserts, "The only secret to Toyota is its attitude towards learning." This constancy of purpose – one of the core Shingo principles – and the belief in nurturing human potential and creativity are the underlying success factors behind Toyota's impressive business achievements.
By embodying the principles codified in the Shingo Model, Toyota has passed down the leadership behaviors necessary to create a culture of continuous learning and high performance through generations.
Toyota's motto, "We make people so we can make cars," is more than words written on a wall -- it is ingrained into every part of their culture, starting with a leader's purpose.
A Leader's Purpose: Leading to Learn
The very first time I encountered Yoshino, he made a simple yet profound comment about his purpose as a leader:
"My aim as a manager was to develop John [Shook, my direct report] by giving him a mission or target, and to support him while he figured out how to achieve the target. And as I was developing John, I was aware I was developing myself as well."
In this one statement, he summed up the essence of leadership, and his statement inspired what I call the Leading to Learn® Framework. It is a powerful construct – simple in concept but more challenging in practice – of achieving business results through developing a people-oriented culture.
A leader's purpose is to:
These three components of purpose build on the foundational principles of the Shingo Model and emphasize the importance of starting with purpose and aligning leaders' behavior to create a culture of excellence.
Set Direction
Setting direction means identifying a destination or issuing your people a clear challenge, target, or goal. Yet it is not just a leader's responsibility to set the direction for needed business results; it's also to set the direction for the organization's culture. Will the culture be focused on short-term business outcomes? Or will it nurture the intellect of its people?
From the beginning, Toyota's leaders set the direction for a company culture that puts people first – through its motto and again through international efforts over decades to ensure that this culture endured even through generational leadership changes. Their unwavering constancy of purpose focused on people before results, continues to be how Toyota delivers exceptional results and value to its customers.
For example, in the 1970s, Toyota's executive leadership team made an apparent and purposeful decision to reinvest in the people-centered learning culture they had established 20 years earlier but had started to wane. Toyota needed to find a way to overcome tough economic times due to the Gulf Oil Crisis and production quality issues. They knew the way to achieve their business results was to focus on developing their people's capabilities to communicate, collaborate, and develop.
As I explain in Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn:
Toyota's senior leaders determined that there was a need to "tighten the screws," and reinvest in the quality culture and hoshin (strategy deployment) practices that had been established at Toyota in the prior two decades. In short, Toyota needed a deliberate countermeasure to close the gap in management capabilities — to "retrain" managers and bring them up to senior management's standard. And to close the gap, Toyota's leaders would need to re-learn how to lead, in order to effectively lead to learn.
As a result, Toyota's senior executive team established a 2-year training program for its 1,000 senior managers to re-learn the leadership skills they considered invaluable to the company's success – how to set direction (through the process of hoshin kanri and by seeking perfection and thinking systemically, two other core Shingo principles), how to support and develop their team members to achieve these results, and how to identify their own opportunities for improvement. This intensive 2-year program also established A3 reports as the standard thinking and people-development process across Toyota.
Toyota intentionally set a clear vision for the culture they wanted, which they saw as how the company would achieve the business results needed to survive and thrive into the future.
Provide Support
Providing support is how leaders demonstrate many Shingo principles, such as respect for every individual, embracing scientific thinking, and focusing on the process. Being a leader means helping others learn how to solve problems, overcome challenges, and achieve targets needed for high performance. It doesn't mean owning the thinking itself, but it means owning the creation of the conditions for learning and setting up a work environment that is safe and conducive to your people to do their best. This practice means asking more questions, listening more effectively, providing space to learn, embracing mistakes and failures, and welcoming people to bring forward problems.
Yet providing support is not just about helping others learn how to solve problems and get business results; it also means providing support to develop the leadership skills to develop others. It's about modeling the way for the leadership culture and behaviors that you want for your organization's culture. It's about maintaining this constancy of purpose to focus on people as the way to get results.
In the Kan-Pro training program, Toyota executives not only asked the senior managers about their progress in achieving the business goals assigned to them but also monitored their development in engaging and developing their team members to accomplish the goals.
For example, as highlighted in Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn:
If during the review sessions a senior manager had not adequately addressed his own contributions to supporting the development of his subordinates, the senior officers would ask, "As a general manager, what did you do to help your subordinate?"
This question reinforced to the senior managers that their responsibility as leaders wasn't only to achieve the business outcomes themselves but also to define how they would support and develop their staff to achieve results.
Develop Yourself
Being a leader requires humility - a core Shingo principle. This means accepting that you are not perfect, that you don't have all the answers, and that you must continually grow and learn as both a leader and a learner. It is essential to lead humbly and not be afraid of adjusting your path toward your goal.
As the Japanese proverb says, "Fall down seven times, get up eight." Accepting your humanness and that you are not perfect helps you navigate setbacks, mistakes, and stumbles as part of the learning journey towards success. Be comfortable admitting that you're wrong and be willing to adjust your course so that you aren't driving yourself – or your team – further in the wrong direction. Humility allows you to fail forward by learning. In embracing humility, you also empower your team to take chances, try something new and to innovate rather than be stuck or afraid to take action.
Consider the following questions: How can you hold up the mirror to your own strengths and opportunities for improvement? How can you more effectively set direction? How can you more effectively help others grow and be successful?
Other Companies Get It Right
It's not just Toyota that has discovered this secret to success. One of the most impactful takeaways from my experiences on my executive Japan Study Trips — which I regularly lead for global leaders to understand the foundation of kaizen and continuous improvement cultures — is that executives of other Japanese companies describe their organization's primary purpose as their people and their people's happiness. This purpose fully embodies the Shingo principle of "respect for every individual."
Leaders' intention is not to create a "nice" workplace, but rather for their people to experience genuine happiness through contributing their ideas for improvement. To do so, these executives go out of their way to seek employees’ input, provide employment stability, and create the conditions for them to grow and succeed by living the core principles of the Shingo Model.
And this focus on people as the way to achieve results is not just a Japanese management concept. As demonstrated by recipients of the Shingo Prize across the globe and other companies with a similar constancy of purpose, successful Western business leaders also know that creating a work environment where people are cared for and invited to contribute their thinking is the way to achieve extraordinary results. For example, Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, has focused on creating a joyful workplace atmosphere to achieve sustainable business results required for growth. Bob Chapman, CEO of the $1.7 billion manufacturing company Barry-Wehmiller, transformed the company by creating an environment where employees are treated like family, resulting in greater engagement and happiness.
You Can Get it Right Too
The secret to effective leadership isn't focusing only on business outcomes; it's about creating the conditions for learning and supporting your people toward achieving the goals. It's about Leading to Learn® and creating the conditions for your people to learn and grow along the way.
The key to achieving results is to focus on people and maintain a constancy of purpose. This involves setting a clear direction for your company, viewing people as the means to achieve those goals, and supporting them in their personal growth and development. It also means fostering a culture of mutual support, where team members work together to improve and learn from one another. Finally, it requires a commitment to continuous self-improvement, so that you can continue to lead your team effectively.
This focus on people and learning as the secret to Toyota also reflects what Mr. Yoshino once described to me as a "Chain of Learning ®" where we are all leaders and learners linked through a shared experience of learning, passing on wisdom, developing ourselves, and achieving more together. It is by developing a Chain of Learning® that strengthens our organizations. This is how we all can embody the principles of the Shingo Model and create high-performing learning organizations.
The way to better performance is not by focusing primarily on the results, outputs, and deliverables but by leaders modeling the way and creating the conditions for learning and growth. The way to get better results faster is by focusing on people and building this Chain of Learninglead® through Leading to Learn®. Not the other way around.
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