Improving Work Quality — TPS as a Leadership Skill

1What Toyota Leadership Training Methods Says

Chapter 8 covers three lectures on TPS as a leadership skill. The scope is deliberately broader than production — the book applies waste elimination, standardization, and process completion to office and service environments as well.

Lecture 28: Begin by Eliminating Waste

The book frames all work in three categories: main work (value-adding), incidental work (necessary support), and waste (adds nothing). The leader's job is to eliminate waste and reduce incidental work so members can maximize time on main work.

The book presents the classic seven wastes (overproduction, waiting, conveyance, processing itself, inventory, motion, defects) with office-work examples for each. They also introduce Toyota's "office/technical workplace" wastes: waste in meetings, rework, materials, coordination, and "the boss's pride" (leader not going to get information personally, burdening members instead).

Lecture 29: Standardization and Multi-Skilling

Standardization here means equalizing workload across members — identifying where one person waits while another rushes, and rebalancing through staffing, work improvement, or process redesign. When workload is equalized, rushing decreases, mistakes decrease, and stress decreases.

Multi-skilling means developing members to perform multiple processes. This creates flexibility (respond to production fluctuations), engagement (members feel contribution to the whole), and improvement (fresh eyes on processes that were previously one person's domain). The book emphasizes that leaders do not need all specialized knowledge — they can lead through observing the gemba, pursuing standardization, and coordinating the skills of their members.

Lecture 30: Completion Within One's Own Process

"The next process is the customer." Completion within one's own process means building quality perfectly into each step — never passing a defect forward. In office work, this manifests as the rework cycle: a leader orders materials, a member creates them, they get rejected, redone, rejected again. The fix: the leader shows the standard before requesting the work — purpose, audience, appropriate level, how far to dig. When both sides share the standard, the gap between result and expectation becomes visible immediately and rework collapses.

2Historical Context

This chapter is perhaps best considered in relationship to TWI Job Methods (JM) for those familiar with it. Toyota taught TWI JM for approximately two to three years before Taiichi Ohno instructed the training department to find a better course. The answer, for thirty years, was Shigeo Shingo.

Shingo is often mistakenly portrayed as a consultant and co-inventor of TPS, but he was nothing of the sort. He was a highly competent industrial engineer who taught IE concepts in something Toyota called the "P-Courses" — P standing for production or productivity. He taught time study, motion study, operation analysis, and process analysis. I have copies of the course materials and they were very traditional IE concepts. You studied the materials in the morning and then the afternoon was observation time practicing the skills. The courses were aimed at young engineers and group leaders.

Shingo retired in the mid-1980s after nearly thirty years of running these workshops at a quarterly interval most years. Toyota replaced his courses over time with internally created standardized work and kaizen courses. These often draw from the same source IE material — the content evolved, but the industrial engineering foundation remains.

3Commentary

The chapter is listed as TPS but it is not really a TPS chapter — it does not cover JIT, jidoka, equipment stability, or problem solving. It is a supervisor-friendly view of improvement through the lens of waste and work: muda, mura, and muri, and the importance of standardized work. I think this is intentional.

While most companies opt for kaizen workshops led by people outside of the production area, Toyota opts to improve work via the people who perform it. In Toyota, improvement starts by analyzing your own work — not someone else's. You time-study, observe, break things down into smaller elements, and identify ideas for improvement.

Fundamentally this is not different from the JM concept of eliminating unnecessary work, combining work elements, rearranging work, or simplifying it. And it overlaps the IE skills Shingo taught — time, motion, operation, and process analysis. Toyota simply packaged it better: put in essential items like standardized work and made the connection to takt time apparent to avoid overproduction waste.

You will not find anything new in this chapter. I provide more detail and comparison in the Standardized Work section of this site.

4Common Mistakes

1. Creating a culture where other people do improvement. Workers are not given the skills, tools, or time to analyze their own processes, let alone make changes to their own area. Improvement is done to them, not by them.
2. Not understanding who owns what. In Toyota, group leaders own standardized work. Team leaders and team members execute it — but with a kaizen mindset. That distinction is something few companies ever pick up on.
3. Ideas come from the outside. In Toyota, the workers and team leaders come up with the ideas for improvement. They are able to execute changes pertaining to methods as long as they do not negatively affect safety, quality, or productivity. Changes stick because the people doing the work came up with the idea — not because someone else ran a kaizen event in their area.
4. Not teaching the kaizen mindset. Toyota teaches and encourages the kaizen mindset at every level. It makes people appreciate their jobs more. Most companies never invest in building this capability — they rely on specialists or external events to drive improvement.

5Key Takeaways

Much of TPS can be traced to industrial engineering roots — time study, motion study, operation and process analysis. Some items like JIT, jidoka, standardized work, and kaizen are more uniquely Toyota. Toyota also has other ways of driving improvements via FMDS and three-pillar activities that this book does not touch upon for whatever reason.

• This chapter is not really TPS — it is a supervisor-friendly view of improvement through waste, work analysis, and standardized work. That framing is intentional and appropriate for frontline leaders.
• Toyota improves work through the people who perform it. The workers and team leaders generate the ideas and execute the changes. That is why they stick.
• The underlying methods — eliminate, combine, rearrange, simplify — trace back through Shingo's P-Courses and TWI Job Methods. Toyota packaged them better with standardized work and takt time.
• For more on how Toyota drives improvement through daily management, see FMDS and Three-Pillar Activity on this site.