In the beginning of the process improvement project the role of a leader is to be coach, trainer and mentor. The smooth start of the change, team motivation and support for the team is the leader‘s main responsibilities. When the operation is up and running, the leader can gradually step a little out to the background and focus on the development of various other areas and to ensure operating conditions of the team. However, the leader must constantly be up to date about the group‘s activities and if necessary, also be the ―boss‖, which decides how to do. (Larikka, 1995, p. 13)
Continuous improvement requires leaders to change their attitude. They have to give up a part of their power and command ‖boss‖ status and tasks which pre-viously belonged to them. Supervisor‘s role is to act as a helper and supporter of action. Change occurs also in the workers role. They should give up the traditional mentality ―make only what you are told‖ and take part of the supervisor‘s work-load. This means that they should start to develop processes independently. De-centralization of responsibility to groups means that manager should trust groups, open discussion with groups and the capacity to work in the front of a group of possible problems and conflicts in the team work. (Larikka, 1995, p. 13)
Leader should recognize the fact that many people are very sensitive to present their own critical opinions for him/her. This means that leader should always cou-rage peoples to bring up their critical opinions on the table. In practice this means that leader should frequently encourage people to be critical. Second, leader can ask critical opinions from team for certain topic or discussion. Third, it is abso-lutely essential that he or she is also able to receive and to deal calmly and delibe-rately opinions, which are questioning their own opinions or views on different topics. In this respect, work communities have generally very sensitive. If manag-er shows facial expression and gestures or even worse vmanag-erbally express critical views towards the working community, they will learn very fast to be silent.
(Järvinen, 2000, p. 72)
Leaders can either rule by top-down directives or use a bottom-up involving style to develop people, so they can think and make right decisions on their own. Toyo-ta leaders are passionate about involving people, who are doing the value-added work in improving the process. Yet encouraging employee involvement by itself is not enough to define a Toyota leader. A second dimension requires an in-depth understanding of the work in addition to general management expertise. It was fashionable in the U.S. in the 1980s to think of the typical successful manager as an MBA who could walk into any business and instantly run it by looking at the numbers and using general management and leadership principles to whip the organization into shape. No self-respecting Toyota manager would subscribe to this notion. The least effective manager in this model is top-down manager and has only general management expertise – the bureaucratic manager. This characte-rizes usually a large portion of managers. The two-dimensional leadership matrix in picture 5 describes how traditional leadership style differentiates from the Toyota style. (Liker, 2004, p. 180 – 181)
Picture 5. Toyota leadership model. (Liker, 2004, p. 181)
By contrast, the Toyota leaders, by having a combination of in-depth understand-ing of the work and the ability to develop, mentor, and lead people, are respected for their technical knowledge as well as followed for their leadership abilities.
Toyota leaders seldom give orders. In fact, the leaders often lead and mentor through questioning. The leader ask questions about the situation and the person`s strategy for action, but they will not give answers to these questions even though they have the knowledge. (Liker, 2004, p. 180 – 181)
Toyota‘s assumption is that if you make teamwork the foundation of the compa-ny, individual performers will give their hearts and souls to make the company successful. Originally, the Toyota Production System was called the respect for humanity system. The Toyota Way is not about lavishing goodies on people whether they have earned them or not; it is about challenging and respecting em-ployees at the same time. (Liker, 2004, p. 186)
It is needed to get employees to work diligently to do their jobs perfectly and strive to improvements every day. But the question is that how to do it? Liker says that by building a system that follows Toyota Way by first looking at the system dynamics of your organization. Building excellent people who understand
and support company`s culture is not a matter of adopting simple solutions or an afterthought of applying motivational theories. Training exceptional people and building individual work groups needs to be the backbone of the management approach, an approach that integrates social systems with technical system. Toyo-ta Way describes how one-piece flow drives positive problem-solving behaviors and motivates people to improve. However, it is needed to create a social system and culture of continuous improvement to support this behavior. (Liker, 2004, p.
198)