A plant sends its supervisors to a two-day coaching class. They come back with a workbook and a card of open questions. For a week or two the boards sound different. Then the questions thin out, the telling comes back, and the plant manager concludes that coaching does not work with this crew.
Nothing was wrong with the class. The mistake was expecting it to do what a class cannot do. Coaching is a skill, and skills are not learned in classrooms. They are learned the way an operator learns a job: by doing it, at the real work, with someone beside you who can correct you while it is happening.
Why the usual approach fails.
Watch how a new operator is brought up to standardized work. Nobody hands her a slide deck and walks away. A Team Leader shows the job, explains the key points, watches her try it, corrects the grip or the sequence while the part is still in her hands, and comes back the next hour and the next day. The skill is built by repetition under observation.
Now watch how the same plant builds coaching skill in a supervisor. A class, then nothing. Nobody stands beside him at the board. Nobody tells him he asked a good question and then answered it himself three seconds later. The plant trains its leaders in a way it would never accept for its operators.
The gap is not knowledge. Most supervisors who have been through the class can describe good coaching. The gap is practice with feedback, which needs a person whose job it is to provide it.
The principle.
At Toyota, developing the people below you is not a side task for a leader. It is part of the job and part of how the job is judged. A Group Leader is expected to develop her Team Leaders, and the way she does it looks a great deal like the way a Team Leader develops an operator.
She watches them coach. She stands beside the Team Leader at the hour-by-hour board during a real conversation with an operator about a real miss, and says nothing while it happens. Afterward she gives feedback specific enough to act on: not “nice job,” but “you asked what he thought was causing it, then suggested the fixture before he answered. Next time, wait.” She models it, by coaching the Team Leader through the Team Leader’s own problem exactly the way she wants him coaching operators. And she repeats it, on a cadence, with the same person, until the habit holds without her.
The class supplies the vocabulary. This routine supplies the habit. Because the routine is the same at every level, it cascades. The plant manager coaches the area managers this way. The area managers coach the Group Leaders. Every level practices the skill on the level below and has it corrected by the level above.
What to do this week.
Pick one Group Leader and one of her Team Leaders. Ask the Group Leader to stand at that Team Leader’s board during one real coaching conversation this week and do nothing but watch. No rescuing and no answering for either of them.
Afterward, in private, two pieces of feedback. One thing the Team Leader did that moved the operator’s thinking forward, named precisely. One thing to try differently next time, named just as precisely. Keep it to two.
Then put the next observation on the calendar before the conversation ends. Same Team Leader, same board, one week out. The second visit is where the skill starts to move, because now the Team Leader knows someone will see whether he tried it.
If the Group Leader is not sure what to look for, start with the pause after the question. It is the easiest thing to see and the hardest thing to do, and it is the subject of the silence after the question.
What leadership has to do to make it last.
This routine dies the moment the level above stops doing it. A Group Leader will not keep observing Team Leaders if nobody observes her, so the plant manager’s first job is to be seen doing it: standing beside an area manager during a coaching conversation, saying nothing, and giving two pieces of feedback afterward. Three more things keep it alive.
First, put observation in leader standardized work. A Group Leader’s week should carry a fixed slot for watching each Team Leader coach, with a note of who was observed and what was fed back. If it is not scheduled, it loses to the next expedite every time.
Second, judge leaders on it. In the monthly review, ask the area managers not how many problems they solved but which Group Leaders they watched coaching this month and what changed. What gets asked about in that room is what gets done on the floor.
Third, accept that it is slow, and that the slowness is the point. A class produces a certificate in two days. An observed, corrected, repeated habit produces a leader who can build other leaders, which is what keeps a management system running after the outside help goes home.
Send people to the class if it helps. Then make sure somebody is standing beside them when they try to use what it taught.
Monte Mitchell is President & CEO of Fourtre Consulting, which helps manufacturers install the authentic Toyota Production System — the management system, not just the tools. If your supervisors came back from a class and nothing changed, let’s walk the floor together.