The work culture of Toyota

There was an informative article in yesterday’s NY Times about the unique work culture at Toyota and the automaker’s challenge now as it tries to transfer that culture to plants and offices in other countries.  For example:

It does not occupy much space on the office wall, but Latondra Newton calls it the hardest thing for Toyota’s new American employees to accept: those colored bar charts against a white bulletin board, in plain view for all to see.

No, they are not representing the company’s progress toward goals. Rather, they are the work targets of individual workers, visibly charting their successes or failures to meet those targets.

This is part of the Toyota Way. The idea is not to humiliate, but to alert co-workers and enlist their help in finding solutions. It took a while for Ms. Newton, a general manager at Toyota’s North American manufacturing subsidiary, to take this fully to heart. But now she is a convert.

As part of its efforts to ingrain this culture in its far flung enterprises, the company has developed a Toyota Institute, where executives are trained in the corporation’s management style.

“Before, when everyone was Japanese, we didn’t have to make these things explicit,” Mr. Konishi said. “Now we have to set the Toyota Way down on paper and teach it.”

“Mutual ownership of problems,” is one slogan. Other tenets include “genchi genbutsu,” or solving problems at the source instead of behind desks, and the “kaizen mind,” an unending sense of crisis behind the company’s constant drive to improve.

The whole company prizes visibility. To nurture a sense of shared purpose, Toyota has open offices — often without even cubicle partitions between desks.

Latondra Newton is one of the executives who has attended the Toyota Institute.

One tenet that she studied was “drive and dedication,” a practice of always seeking out problems and then solving them by breaking them into smaller, more manageable pieces. The class also discussed other slogans, like “effective consensus building” and “respect for people.” …

Toyota’s culture, she said, is still grounded in a Japanese-oriented brand of group-think. But in some cases, Toyota has also adapted it to fit American culture, she said, dropping group calisthenics at American factories, for example, although that is still common at Japanese plants.

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