Respect for People in Daily Leadership

1What Toyota Leadership Training Methods Says

Chapter 3 is the beginning of the TCS (Toyota Communication Skill) content. It lays the philosophical and behavioral foundation: respect for humanity is not a slogan but a set of daily leadership practices aimed at enabling every member to exercise their "power to think."

Lecture 9: Create a Workplace with Strong Respect for Humanity

The book defines respect for humanity as respecting each person's power to think and creating conditions where that power can be exercised. This connects directly to the five major responsibilities (safety, quality, production, cost, human resource development) — results come through members, so the leader's job is to draw out their capabilities.

The book introduces Toyota's "good supervisory method" — four principles: ask people to do what you want done, ask at the time you want it done, ask in the way you want it done, and make it possible for them to do it willingly. They also define what a "bright workplace" looks like: purpose in life, places for wisdom and creativity, places that enhance abilities, harmony through work, mutual development, and cross-boundary recognition.

Lecture 10: Face the Diversity of Each Member

Every member has a different background — family situation, health, hobbies, career history, values. The book argues that leaders must first acknowledge they do not yet know their members well, then invest in understanding each person as an individual. Communication must be adapted to different values: some members prioritize family, some prioritize skill development, some prioritize hobbies. The speed of building closeness also differs by person.

A key point: the leader must change first. Changing how the leader connects with members produces faster results than trying to change members one by one. When members see the leader has changed, their awareness begins to shift.

Lecture 11: Four Basic Mindsets for Building Relationships of Trust

Toyota teaches four "basic mindsets for improving relationships with people":

1. When work performance is good, tell the person.
2. When something is good, praise it.
3. Tell the person in advance about changes that will affect them.
4. Make full use of the person's abilities.

The book expands each: decide the role you want someone to take and communicate it clearly; notice inconspicuous good work and praise it; explain reasons behind changes and gain understanding; discover hidden strengths and find paths to use them. The chapter compares this individualized approach to "manual work" — craft skill built through accumulated practice.

2Historical Context

"Respect for People" and "Continuous Improvement" became Toyota's two-pillar summary of the Toyota Way around 2001, codified under then-president Fujio Cho. But the content is not new — it traces directly to the company's founding era. Cho's formulation simplified decades of practice into a message the global company could share. It has not needed to change much since, and it is standing the test of time.

Lecture 11's "four basic mindsets for improving relationships with people" is a faithful reproduction of TWI Job Relations' proactive principles — the same four items, in the same order, serving the same purpose. TWI had three programs that Toyota adopted in the early 1950s: Job Instruction (JI), Job Relations (JR), and Job Methods (JM). Their fates inside Toyota diverged sharply:

• JI was taught regularly for decades — on a monthly basis — and became the backbone of Toyota Job Instruction (TJI).
• JR was taught less frequently over time. By the era I joined the company, it was rarely trained as a standalone course. But its core concepts survived embedded in leadership culture.
• JM was abandoned at Taiichi Ohno's direction and replaced with more modern courses built around TPS and kaizen concepts.

The striking thing is that even fifty years after JR stopped being regularly trained as a course, Toyota is still teaching its four proactive mindsets — now under different names, presented as Toyota wisdom rather than TWI content. The ideas proved durable enough to outlive the program that introduced them. Once again, the OJT Solutions authors show no awareness of the TWI lineage. They present these as Toyota traditions, which — after fifty years of continuous practice — they genuinely are. But the reader should recognize the source.

3Commentary

In my opinion, the problem with TWI Job Relations was always that it was fundamentally a reactive methodology. You tried to be aware of problems and how they arise. Then the emphasis shifted to the JR worksheet — a structured method for solving a personnel problem after it occurred. That method is somewhat flawed, and I believe this is why JR was less emphasized at Toyota over time. Ideally you want a proactive approach to personnel development — a plan and a process that prevents problems from arising, not just a method for handling them after the fact.

That is exactly what Toyota built. JR was not simply abandoned — it was replaced with something better. The three-pillar activity, FMDS (Floor Management Development System), and the newer versions of TJI, TCS, and TPS represent a more proactive version of all the same underlying concepts. Instead of waiting for a relationship problem and pulling out a worksheet, the leader is developing people daily through structured activity that strives to prevent most problems from occurring.

Toyota has moved well beyond traditional TWI courses. The four proactive mindsets survived because they are sound principles. But the reactive problem-solving worksheet did not survive as a primary tool — because Toyota built something better around it. Companies studying TWI today should learn from this: the principles are timeless, but the original course format is not the final word. Toyota's evolution shows what these ideas look like when they mature into a complete leadership system rather than remaining a standalone training program.

4Common Mistakes

1. Chasing faddish themes. Self-directed work teams, leaderless teams, whatever training program is popular because a book was published this year. A couple of years later most of these do not stick. Companies adopt them with enthusiasm and abandon them with silence. The cycle repeats every few years.
2. Skipping the long middle. The lesson from Toyota is a pattern: learn the basics, create internal standards, make them work over time — long years and decades in Toyota's case — then carefully improve the contents, and eventually create newer versions. Most companies want the end state without the decades of disciplined practice that produce it.
3. Letting inexperience override the system. I have visited companies where a person two or three years out of college was given free reign to throw out existing methods and try something new in the name of improvement. It never worked. If a person with two or three years of experience can change your culture or system, then in reality you do not have a culture or a system to begin with.

5Key Takeaways

I believe from decades of observation that Toyota has the best shop floor leadership development and training system in the world for manufacturing. This book starts to give us a glimpse of it, but unfortunately it falls short of connecting the principles more fully to FMDS, three-pillar activity, and the operational mechanisms that make them real. Those connections are mentioned later in the book, but they could have been much more forcefully made in these earlier chapters.

• "Respect for People" is not a slogan — it is an operational system with specific daily behaviors, proactive mindsets, and structured development activities behind it.
• The four mindsets in Lecture 11 descend directly from TWI Job Relations — proof that sound principles survive even when the original program fades from memory.
• Toyota moved beyond reactive problem-solving (JR worksheets) to proactive leadership systems (FMDS, three-pillar activity, TCS). Companies studying these concepts should aim for the same evolution.
• Culture is not built by adopting the latest popular program. It is built by learning basics, creating standards, practicing them for years, and carefully improving over time.