Building Trust with Team Members

1What Toyota Leadership Training Methods Says

Chapter 4 moves from philosophy to method. It introduces two numbered frameworks that Toyota uses to train leaders in communication: six techniques for activating communication and eight approaches for raising members' motivation.

Lecture 12: Six Basic Communication Methods

Toyota recommends six techniques for activating communication between leaders and members:

1. Recognition — acknowledging the member's existence, values, and contributions as a person.
2. Listening — hearing fully without shutting down, interrupting, or giving half-attention.
3. Empathy — standing at the same eye level as the member (distinct from sympathy, which looks down).
4. Matching — repetition, summarizing, and prompting that signal "I am your ally" and remove the wall between positions.
5. Questions — limited questions (single-answer, 5W1H) for building rhythm and gathering facts; expanded questions (affirmative and negative) for drawing out causes and countermeasures.
6. Instructions, proposals, and advice — three modes matched to the member's level: instructions for new employees, proposals for mid-level (present options, let them think), advice for experienced employees (support their independent action).

The book emphasizes that these are not used one at a time but in combination, adapted to each member's personality, experience, and skill level.

Lecture 13: Eight Approaches for Raising Members' Motivation

When members lose motivation — through routine, poor climate, or feeling unrecognized — Toyota teaches leaders eight approaches:

1. Show the higher-level purpose — connect daily work to social role, customer impact, or company vision.
2. Confirm upstream and downstream processes — make members feel the weight of their work by seeing what comes before and after.
3. Adopt members' opinions — take their ideas into meetings and act on the good ones.
4. Create opportunities to mention members by name — attach their name to improvements, let them present their own work.
5. Have members participate in new employee education — teaching resets perspective and creates self-regulation.
6. Present model people — give members a concrete person to emulate, divided by aspect (skill from A, character from B).
7. Disclose goals and roles — make individual responsibilities and team targets visible (the daily management board is the tool).
8. Have members interact with people in the same situation — peer gatherings that relieve isolation and create mutual encouragement.

2Historical Context

This chapter is insightful and goes beyond what the original TWI courses offered. It makes certain concepts more explicit. That is not to say TWI courses did not address communication and motivation — they did — but Toyota's modern version is more explicit and modeled in reality. The six basic communication skills are elementary but vital. The eight approaches for raising motivation are excellent structural improvements over what TWI provided.

Toyota clearly states that this content had to evolve from the early 2000s period. Several forces drove the change: the thinning out of group leader experience levels during rapid production expansion, the rise of overseas production requiring methods that could transfer across cultures, and the changing societal aspects of Japanese culture — younger workers arriving with different expectations and communication styles than previous generations. What had been transmitted informally through experienced leaders now needed to be codified and taught explicitly because the informal channels were no longer sufficient.

3Commentary

While this content was codified in the 2000s era alongside the new Toyota Way rollout, many leaders in Toyota already modeled this behavior. My manager Tomoo "Tom" Harada was excellent in all these areas in the 1980s and 1990s. Fujio Cho was excellent as well. The codification made explicit what the best leaders were already doing — it did not invent new behavior.

Toyota found that for many of its improvement ideas it did not need to look outward for materials. The best examples and the people who promoted these ideals were internal leaders. Toyota studied its own best practitioners and built the training around what they observed. The TJI, TCS, and TPS concepts in this book are very Toyota-like and borrow heavily from Japanese culture and Toyota's own internal culture. They were not borrowed from the outside. This is the opposite of how most companies develop leadership training — hiring consultants, buying off-the-shelf programs, or copying what another company published. Toyota looked inward, found what already worked, and structured it for teaching.

4Common Mistakes

The mistake with all of these topics — throughout the entire book — is treating them as training done in a classroom. They are not. Building trust in particular is what happens with thoughts, behavior, and actions after the training session ends.

I have seen dozens of excellent training presentations in a classroom. But as soon as people return to work, everything goes back to normal. What I call the "black hole" of existing culture wins — everyone returns to the default norms. The gravitational pull of how things have always been done is stronger than any two-day workshop.

Changes have to be modeled outside of the training room and brought into actual work practices, behaviors, and thought patterns. Leaders must demonstrate the new behavior daily, not just teach it once. Otherwise it is just classroom training — a pleasant experience that changes nothing.

5Key Takeaways

People assume I had world-class training on TPS and problem solving at Toyota. I did — I was at Kamigo Engine Plant, long a model facility for TPS in general. Taiichi Ohno was the founding plant manager and put his personal stamp on the facility from 1965 to 1980. However, my training classes were remarkably short and practical. I learned 10% of TPS and problem solving in the classroom. The other 90% I learned on the job working with my peers, mentors, and managers. It does not work the other way around.

• The six communication techniques and eight motivation approaches go beyond what TWI offered — Toyota made the implicit explicit when informal transmission was no longer enough.
• Toyota did not borrow these methods from outside. It studied its own best leaders and codified what they already practiced.
• Classroom training is 10% at best. The real development happens on the job — with peers, mentors, and managers modeling the behavior daily.
• The "black hole" of existing culture will swallow any training program that is not reinforced through daily practice and leadership modeling.