Joe: The most popular of all TWI programs is Job Instructions. I think you take a little different bend on it rather than just thinking of it for the worker. You talk about how it plays a role of developing leaders, can you expand on that?
Related Podcast and Transcription: Using The 7 Kata
Conrad Soltero: I’ve just developed recently a training program on Lean leadership and you can find that under my name in SlideShare and what it really talks about is how leaders at Toyota really need to become teachers. In fact, if you go back to some of Jeffrey Liker’s books, for example, Toyota Way or Toyota Talent, teaches that in principle number 9. Teaching is the most highly valued skill of leaders and leaders have to deeply understand the work to teach and coach others. So, there’s one kind of citation on why teaching is so important to leadership. Secondly, there’s a quote from Atsushi Niimi, he was asked about his greatest challenge from trying to teach the Toyota way to his American Managers. How he responded was to say that they want to be managers not teachers which to him was a bad thing. He explained that every manager at Toyota must be a teacher developing exceptional people is Toyota’s number one priority. So, being a teacher is really, I think, as a manager or a leader in a Lean system is key and I think the first step. It’s not holistic but the first step towards being a good teacher is to be an excellent instructor. So, you know, after that you become a teacher by really starting to practice the Kata. So, both practicing the Job Instruction training on the job with one-on-one instruction and kind of spring boarding off of that into the improvement Kata can really make you the leader that Lean really mandates.
Joe: Lean leaders need to have some type of practical expertise. Could I go so far saying that?
Conrad: Well, they have to, absolutely. First of all, they have to have total knowledge of their content or their specific work. From that, how do you get her to cross and how do you understand it in order to promulgate it to the masses and how to manage people. So, yes, you have to really have those two skills, that skill of instruction and then what’s really interesting is the cognitive science behind the skill of improvement that really, can really fortify that effort to become a great leader.
About: Shingo Prize winning author, Conrad Soltero won the Shingo Prize as the principal author of The 7 Kata: Toyota Kata, TWI, and Lean Training.
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