What Is the Toyota Chief Engineer Mindset (心掛け)?
The Toyota chief engineer leads with no authority over the engineers. What fills the gap is kokorogake (心掛け), a set of daily mental habits that Toyota's chief engineers each wrote down, and that converge.
What Is the Toyota Chief Engineer Mindset (心掛け)?
The Toyota chief engineer leads a whole vehicle program with almost no command authority over the engineers who do the work. The well-known half of the role is that gap in authority. The less-told half is what fills it. Toyota’s chief engineers call it 心掛け (kokorogake), the set of things you keep in mind and practice every day. The revealing fact is that several different chief engineers, across different generations, each wrote their own version down, and the versions converge. The mindset is not one person’s temperament. It is a discipline the role transmits.
This article is a companion to the main guide, What Is the Toyota Chief Engineer (Shusa) System?.
What does kokorogake (心掛け) mean?
心掛け is built from 心 (kokoro), heart or mind, and 掛け (kake), to hang or to apply. Together it means what you keep your mind on at all times. The usual English word is “mindset,” but that word has drifted toward motivation and attitude. Kokorogake is plainer and more practical. It is closer to bearing, or comportment, or habitual care. It describes what you actually do and attend to day after day, not what you believe.
Former chief engineer and Executive Vice President of Engineering Akihiro Wada used exactly this word for his own list of rules. He titled it 《チーフエンジニアの心掛けについて》, on the mindset of the chief engineer. The choice of word matters. He was not writing a philosophy of leadership. He was writing down the daily habits a chief engineer should hold.
Why did more than one chief engineer write the mindset down?
Because the role cannot be taught with an org chart, and its leaders knew it. There is no chief engineer school at Toyota. A chief engineer is grown on the job, near other chief engineers, over decades. So the senior ones kept trying to put the unwritten part into words.
Tatsuo Hasegawa wrote down the first version of the ten principles, pitched as an ideal to strive for. Decades later Wada wrote ten of his own, pitched as daily practice, as a deliberate plain-spoken answer to Hasegawa’s loftier set. More recently Naoto Kitagawa, a chief engineer a generation later, wrote seventeen. Three chief engineers. Three separate lists. Written years apart, for different reasons.
That they kept writing them is the first clue. That they overlap so heavily is the second. When three people who never coordinated arrive at the same handful of disciplines, those disciplines are not personality quirks. They are the actual content of the job. The mindset is transmissible, which is the whole reason the role survives one person leaving it.
What are Kitagawa’s three hearts?
The most compact statement of the mindset comes from the most recent of the three. Kitagawa, who was a chief engineer from 1996 to 2005, built his seventeen principles on three dispositions he held essential. Curiosity. Consideration for others. Imagination. He treated these three as the ground the rest of the role stands on.
The three are worth holding onto because they explain the daily habits rather than just listing them. Curiosity is why a chief engineer has to know how everything is made and what everything costs. Consideration for others is why he has to persuade rather than command, and why he looks after the people in his own group. Imagination is why he can hold a picture of a car that does not exist yet and steer a thousand specialists toward it. The seventeen principles that grow out of these three are covered in Naoto Kitagawa — Toyota Chief Engineer’s Work.
Where do the chief engineers’ mindsets converge?
Read the three lists together and the same disciplines surface again and again. This overlap is the real description of the chief engineer’s mindset.
Curiosity treated as an obligation. All three insist the chief engineer keep learning past his own field. Hasegawa called it the specialty beyond your specialty. Wada said know the price of everything, and meant it literally. He thought a chief engineer should be able to pick up any part and name a roughly right cost, and that the way you earn that is by staying curious about how ordinary things are made and sold. Kitagawa put curiosity first among his three hearts.
Honesty with the people who do the work. The mindset is strict about how the chief engineer treats subordinates. Wada’s firmest rule was that if someone did exactly what you told him, you may never deny you gave the instruction. When you are wrong, you say so at once and take the rework on yourself. Hasegawa’s version is that you correct how the work was done, never the result, and when you want to scold, you scold yourself. A leader with no authority runs entirely on trust, so he cannot afford to spend any.
Integration across the whole vehicle. None of the three lets the chief engineer hide in his home specialty. He owns the cost, the concept, the market, and the result, across every function. Wada refused to leave cost to finance or selling to the sales division. Kitagawa said the same in his own words. The mindset is to take responsibility for the entire car, not the part of it you happen to understand best.
Developing the people who come next. Each list ends up in the same place. Grow the chief engineer’s staff, trust them, and treat their development as part of the job. Wada’s tenth point is to develop the staff and make the effort to delegate. Hasegawa insists the chief engineer and his staff are one person. The role is built to be handed on, and the mindset includes preparing the hand-off.
How is the mindset the positive side of the authority paradox?
The authority paradox explains what the chief engineer cannot do. He cannot simply order the engineers to make a change. Kokorogake explains what he does instead. The two fit together.
A leader stripped of command authority needs some other source of followership. The easy assumptions are charisma, vision, or politics. The chief engineers in their histories of the position and their lists describe none of those. They describe a stack of unglamorous daily habits. Know what things cost. Be technically proficient. Be specific. Own your mistakes the moment you find them. Concede the close calls to keep people motivated. Keep meetings short. Check the work, or at least make sure the work believes it is being checked. Grow your successors. This is what earns the agreement the org chart does not grant. Why Toyota built the role to run on this rather than on authority is the subject of Why Does Toyota’s Chief Engineer Have No Authority?.
The mindset is the mechanism. Wada’s full ten points, with his own commentary on each, are in Akihiro Wada — Chief Engineer and the Oral History of the Shusa System, and Hasegawa’s contrasting ten are in What Are the Toyota Chief Engineer Principles?.
This article draws on the Akihiro Wada Oral History (2008) and Naoto Kitagawa’s Toyota Chief Engineer’s Work, both Japanese-language primary sources by former Toyota chief engineers, together with firsthand knowledge of the Toyota chief engineer system. Translations from the Japanese are the author’s renderings. AI was used in the editing of this article.
Art Smalley is president of Art of Lean, Inc.