Next Level Blog

Three Quick Leadership Lessons from Toyota

With the ongoing spate of stories about Toyota’s safety recall and this week’s congressional testimony by Mr. Toyoda himself, it’s easy to forget that it was just a few years ago that the company was enjoying a twenty plus year run as a quality leader in the automotive industry. During that time, they expanded their operations in the United States and now, on a direct and indirect basis, employ about 170,000 Americans. In my family, we own two Toyotas and are very happy with them. My guess is the company will recover from its current crisis.

Still, there are some pretty big leadership mistakes that have been made at Toyota lately. I don’t think their mistakes are unique to Toyota. As Jim Collins outlines in his latest book, How The Mighty Fall, even the most successful organization’s fortunes can turn quickly. Often it is the success that established them in the first place that can lead to trouble down the road. With that idea in mind, here are three things I’ve noticed about the Toyota situation that I think are lessons for leaders in any field:

Truman Thursdays: The Handler Explains It All

In this week’s video installment of life on the USS Harry S Truman, Lt. Cmdr. Rodney Mullins explains how he and his team use the “Ouija board” to keep track of everything going on on the flight deck. Lt. Cmdr. Mullins is the aircraft handling officer, otherwise known as the handler. If you liked my post last month on how to keep the plates spinning, you’ll appreciate what Lt. Cmdr. Mullins has to say. He and his team juggle and move at a rapid pace to keep everything with aircraft operations moving safely and efficiently.

Prior to Lt. Cmdr. Mullins, you’ll get a look at the C-2 Greyhound transport plane that took my group from the Norfolk Naval Air Station out to the Truman and a few shots of how things looked from inside the plane right after we landed on deck.

Up next week is the guy who runs the ship’s air traffic control tower, the Air Boss. Stay tuned, it’s a good one.

How Do You Handle It When You’re the Boss and Not the Peer?

In case you missed it, there was a terrific profile in the Sunday New York Times on the new CEO of Xerox, Ursula Burns. The article, and her quotes within it, focused on one of my favorite topics, leadership transitions. There’s a lot of valuable perspective and advice in the article. I want to pick up on one particular aspect in this post. How do you handle it when you move from being a member of the team (no matter how big) to the leader of that same team? 

The setting as described in the Times is a Xerox sales meeting in Orlando with several hundred reps.  Burns is “an old friend to many of them, and there are plenty of hugs to go around for the people she’s grown up with during her 30 years at the company. But there is also a new distance, a new curiosity about what she will do, given that she is no longer just Ursula. She is Ursula M. Burns, the C.E.O.”

That passage describes in a nutshell a phenomenon that many leaders experience at least once if not more in their careers. Whether it’s expected or not, you end up leading people you’ve worked with for years. Earlier today, I was interviewing two women who are senior executives in the financial services and pharmaceutical industries for the upcoming second edition of my book, The Next Level.  Both of them offered some great advice on how to lead people who used to be your peers.

Here it is:

Video Book Club: The Good Soldiers

I’m pulling the lens back this week away from a focus on books about leadership skills and towards a focus on a real life story of leadership in practice. David Finkel’s book, The Good Soldiers, is the story of what he saw in the eight months he spent embedded with US Army battalion 2-16 during 15 months of the 2007 – 2008 surge of the Iraq war. Given recent events in Afghanistan, this book provides important insights into the myriad challenges that our armed forces face in combat. 

What It Takes to Build Leaders

Last Friday, I heard a presentation on a study that anyone concerned with building leadership as a competitive advantage should take a look at. It was from Richmond Fourney, a senior consultant with Hewitt Associates working on their biannual study of the Best Companies for Leaders. Joining him was Suzanne Danielle, the director of talent management for Lockheed Martin which ranked 16th of the top 25 North American companies for leaders. 

You can get a summary of the study from Hewitt (conducted with Fortune magazine and the RBL Group) here. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some high level conclusions from the research along with a bit of commentary.

The research says that there are Four Disciplines that the top companies for leaders follow: