Team Leaders — The Engine of Toyota’s Performance

What if every problem on your frontline was addressed within 60 seconds, or at least within the “cycle of work”? What if your frontline managers weren’t constantly firefighting but actually developing people and preventing problems from recurring?

In an LEI webinar in October, Josh Howell and Jamie Bonini explored one of the most critical — yet misunderstood — roles in the Toyota Production System (TPS): the team leader. Unlike traditional supervisors who manage 20 or more people while juggling countless responsibilities, Toyota’s team leaders support just four to six team members with a laser focus on real-time and lasting problem solving, adherence to standardized work, and people development.

Jamie brings more than 30 years of TPS experience and is President of the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), a not-for-profit corporation affiliated with Toyota Motor North America that since 1992 has shared Toyota know-how with more than 500 small- to mid-sized companies, government entities, and non-profits. Josh, President of LEI, brings a lean background that started at Starbucks nearly two decades ago.

Problems of a Traditional Manager

Josh related a specific experience he had when managing a Starbucks coffee shop in Portland, Oregon. Prior to understanding lean concepts, he received an email indicating that a few people from corporate would be coming to observe how a coffee shop runs, and he was determined to put his best foot forward. When corporate arrived, he was supervising the shift that day and serving as a “floater” — floating between all the workstations, plugging any holes in processes, and trying to keep everything running as smoothly as possible amid a morning onslaught.

Josh and Jamie reveal why a team leader role is virtually impossible to replicate without the proper structure (i.e., lean/TPS) — and why most lean transformations struggle without such roles. Their conversation should challenge organizations to consider frontline leadership and capability development in new ways.

As the morning rush grew, a long line of customers formed and a queue of cups stacked up at the espresso machine. Josh did his best to take care of all the customers and support all the baristas, and believed he was impressing the corporate visitors with his valiant effort.

“Of course, as I later learned more about lean and got to talk to these visitors about what they were interested in and what they were beginning to think about, I came to understand that the heroics I was demonstrating on that fateful morning were simply covering up a poorly designed, poorly running operating system — one where we weren’t actively monitoring for problems, we weren’t capably engaged in problem solving. We were simply doing our best, often going beyond human capacity to keep the store running, keep our customers happy, and keep the coffee flowing.”

Josh’s role at that time was the antithesis of a lean team leader and he was certainly not working in a lean system: “Lean is everyone learning to create value and flow easier, better, sooner, cheaper for everyone’s benefit,” said Josh, noting that everyone refers to workers, managers, executives, shareholders, owners, and, of course, customers. “Everyone should benefit in a lean system.”

Team Leader Role and Ratio at Toyota

In contrast to Josh’s leader heroics are the actions of Toyota team leaders, working within TPS. “The Toyota Production System is an organizational culture of highly engaged people solving problems and innovating to drive performance,” said Jamie. “This culture is created by a three-part system: a philosophy that underlies technical tools and practices and must be supported by a managerial role to engage and develop people.”

Toyota team leaders also are key players in standing up the famed TPS house: two pillars of just-in-time (pull system, takt time, continuous flow) and built-in quality/jidoka (stop and notify abnormalities using andon, separate human work and machine work), which rest on a foundation of stability (people, materials, work methods, procedures, and machinery) that supports standardized work (heijunka and kaizen).

“For TPS, we try to run the operation with a high level of continuous flow, and disruptions to the flow are problems as part of just-in-time,” said Jamie. “With a high level of jidoka — signals, alarms, lights, music — we surface abnormalities or problems. As we are running the operation, by design, intentionally, lots of problems come to the surface. We couple that with an organizational structure and people who are passionate and engaged to solve those problems so many of them don’t reoccur. And by massive amounts of reoccurrence prevention, we get better and better performance and, done properly, we get engaged people who are excited to solve more and more problems.”

Within TPS, which exposes lots of problems, Jamie said the team leader has four main roles:

Maintain output: Make sure work at frontline stations can be completed within the takt time so the assembly line doesn’t stop (e.g., an auto worker might have a takt time of 60 seconds to complete their tasks). The team leader includes backfilling and assisting team members when needed.

Standardized work: The team leader coaches the team member on standardized work, confirms it through regular reviews and observation, writes the standardized work document that a team member follows, and continuously rewrites the document and gets agreement to make the work better (easier, faster, safer, fewer problems).

Train team members: This is especially focused on new team members needing fundamental skills. They may have had some fundamental skill training offline, and then the team leader provides real-time, practical training right in the area.

Solve problems: Team leaders solve problems in the work to prevent reoccurrence every day.

Jamie gave the example of a team member working on a vehicle moving down the production line and eventually there is a problem: a part won’t fit, a vehicle is scratched, something doesn’t sound right. The team member pulls the andon cord, which signals music and a light on the andon board, and within seconds the team leader arrives and investigates: What is the problem? The leader gets a description and then works to contain the problem so the line doesn’t stop within the 60 seconds (takt time), even doing something temporarily to contain the problem. Next, the leader goes to work on root-cause analysis to try to prevent the problem from happening again.

“There’s a high likelihood that problem may have occurred very recently, right before that signal, so a lot of the evidence is fresh,” said Jamie. “That team leader is working right in that location to help attack that problem. This team leader provides on-demand, immediate, urgent problem-solving as they’re called by the andon system.”

Typically, for every four Toyota team members doing standardized work, there will be one offline team leader — roughly a four-to-one ratio, sometimes up to six, which is in stark contrast to the ratio found in non-lean companies. When Jamie and TSSC help organizations build a team leader role outside Toyota in non-automotive environments, they use four key criteria to determine the necessary ratio:

Layout and geography: How easily and quickly can the team leader arrive if there’s a problem signaled?

Number, frequency, and complexity of problems: During a new product launch or startup operation with many problems, a smaller ratio may be needed for more problem-solving capacity.

Skill of the team member: Highly skilled, experienced team members with good performance will have fewer problems arising.

Skill of the team leader: An experienced, strong team leader can handle more team members because they have more skills and familiarity with the process.

A ratio beyond six-to-one can make it difficult for a team leader to do reoccurrence-prevention problem solving, properly own the process, write and update all the standardized work, and adequately develop team members.

Team Leader vs. Supervisor

It’s important to note that Toyota team leaders are not supervisors. They are almost always a former team member that was promoted and who knows all the standardized work being followed by team members, said Jamie: “They’re not in a managerial role — they’re in a support or assist role.” A team leader occasionally will fill in as a team member to cover absenteeism, which then requires another team leader to cover two teams (eight team members).

The supervisor is the first level of management in Toyota North America and called a “group leader.” The group leader typically oversees about four or five team leaders and, as such, is responsible 20 to 25 team members. As the first level of management , the group leader conducts performance reviews and any disciplinary action under their control, including coaching, developing, and performance reviews of team leaders.

Developing Team Leaders

To become a team leader inside Toyota requires various training before being promoted or applying for the role, including demonstrated problem-solving skills through quality circles and good human-relations skills. The group leader coaches and develops team leaders in their area, similar to how team leaders have significant responsibility to coach and develop team members.

“That group leader may get help from support functions like human resources and quality for training material and development and some other type of work that would be done,” said Jamie. “But the ultimate responsibility to build and develop strong team leaders is on that group leader or supervisor.”

When TSSC introduces the team leader role to companies outside of Toyota, it’s usually done with a pilot in a small area. Individuals are nominated to play the team leader role on an experimental basis and asked to fulfill the four roles of a team leader, said Jamie. The experiment is designed to be intuitive and practical for these people, who are usually former team members and can relate and see the benefits of, as a team member, getting assistance with problems from a team leader.

“We create that position and coach people to those four roles, and, as those roles evolve, we train people on more intricate skills like problem solving, standardized work, and how to jump in to maintain output and build that role gradually over time through experimentation and trial through a pilot.”

Team Leaders Outside of Toyota

The team leader role is rarely found outside of Toyota in North America, said Jamie. In most cases organizations do not have the four-to-one ratio and the four roles held by a team leader. “There are organizations that have a utility-type person, but they’re not fulfilling these four roles, or they’ll have a larger ratio than four- to six-[to-one]. When I’ve seen that, I can’t think of any time when they’ve been able to perform the roles as we described — it’s just too much on the plate of the team leader to actually fulfill those four roles effectively.”

Josh equated the “utility” description to his shift supervisor role at Starbucks, where the ratio was correct but the emphasis was on floating and keeping the operation running in any way possible. “I was not in a position to fulfill those four roles.”

“If you don’t have the ratio and the skill and other factors, it’s impossible or very difficult for people to solve problems one by one as they occur immediately as we described — pull the cord, arrive, investigate, contain, root cause,” cautioned Jamie. “People can’t do it. There are just too many problems coming at them. The other thing I’ve found is that without this role working effectively, it’s impossible or very difficult to create and sustain standardized work.”

Josh and Jamie also discussed how unlikely it is for organizations — even those doing good work and improving continuously — to achieve Toyota-like performance without team leaders working within a system comparable to TPS and pursuing an expression of lean, as described earlier.

“In my 15 years doing this, I haven’t seen it,” said Jamie. “It may be happening somewhere and I haven’t been exposed to it in my work. The hallmark of TPS is using just-in-time and jidoka to solve massive amounts of problems on the frontline, one by one, as they occur, very close to the work being done. Massive amounts of reoccurrence prevention fuels performance and fuels engagement and job satisfaction. That’s the essence of it.”

This article was written by Claude, the artificial intelligence service by Anthropic, based on the transcript from the Team Leader webinar with Josh Howell and Jamie Bonini.

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