I have extended my interest more deeply into Training within Industry (TWI) which was presented in a very unique way in the book, The 7 Kata: Toyota Kata, TWI, and Lean Training. The book was published in 2012 and authored by Pat Boutier and Conrad Soltero. It received the Shingo Award for Research and Professional Publications from the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence.
Pat is my podcast guest next week and I asked him one of favorite questions at the end of the podcast last week, “What would like to mention that I did not ask?”
An excerpt from the podcast:
Pat: I guess the only thing that I can add is that I have been trying to understand why companies don’t grab the Job Relations Kata out of TWI and run with it. That to me is a glaring issue in most companies today. Because if you know anybody that works anywhere, probably 50 to 60 to 80 percent of those 
people are unhappy. They’re unhappy with someone in the management chain. Those things seem pervasive everywhere and they’re so easy to take care of if they were following Job Relations systematically within a company, and it seems very difficult to get companies to buy into this or managers to buy into this.
That’s one of the things that I’m looking at and trying to expand. I came across just recently that we hadn’t touched in the book was a lot of people in Human Resources are talking about they should become strategic partners with their management peers. I think the 7 Kata is one way they can do that. If they become knowledgeable on all this and start to coach their CEO, called the “C sweep of leaders”. I use that term to mean any size company, because a company that’s only a hundred people, might call himself a CEO, he/she might call themselves just the owner, it doesn’t matter. They need a coach; they need a mentor to help them. Not tell them what to do, but to help them understand their strategic directions and how are they respecting people. And more to it, how are their people respecting people. That’s what I think many leaders miss, is they think they’re respecting people but how it gets transmitted through the layers doesn’t always get done right. Obviously with all the literature that goes on about how many people are unhappy at work, there’s something there that needs to change. Job Relations could help it but don’t know yet how to grab the attention.
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