Case study: Toyota Australia
Implementing a successful leadership and change management strategy with Mt Eliza executive education
Toyota Australia presented a singular challenge to Mt Eliza executive education – how to integrate leadership development with the “Toyota Way” for the Australian organisation. And at that time, in 2002, the motor industry icon was itself facing enormous challenges: introducing a new, locally manufactured model and facing increasing competition from local and international competitors.
For Mt Eliza executive education's leadership and behavioural change programs to succeed, Mt Eliza’s team had to fully appreciate the company’s ethos. Consensus is the key when introducing change under the Toyota Way, according to Toyota Australia’s Ursula Groves. “You investigate the root cause of the problem before you suggest solutions, and before you implement solutions you go through a whole consensus-building process and make sure you have all the stakeholders on board.”
Ms Groves was then Corporate Manager, Organisational Development in 2002, when Mt Eliza was called in. She recalls the pressures Toyota Australia then faced. “The company was under pressure to improve its profitability, the manufacturing operation was working at full stretch to deliver a high quality, new model Camry to domestic and export customers, and falling tariffs and currency rates were making the market place extremely volatile,” she says.
The company has since turned that around, to sell more than 200,000 vehicles in the domestic market in 2004 and 2005 and export a record 69,000 cars in 2005.
Toyota Australia responded to its challenges by launching its own “Drivers of Change” suite of programs, which included 360-degree feedback, a new remuneration strategy and performance management systems. The Toyota Leaders program, in partnership with Mt Eliza executive education, was part of this suite.
The programs had to embed the Toyota tools and processes and align all staff with the corporate direction. Over a 3-year period, more than 650 Toyota Australia staff did at least one of the four Toyota Leaders-Mt Eliza executive education programs that had been tailored to the needs of the company: Ethical Leadership; Leading the Toyota Way (which was aimed at senior executives); Transformational Leadership and Foundations of Leadership. A targeted group also did the Looking Glass Experience. Looking Glass is a behavioural change simulation delivered in Australia by Mt Eliza, under an exclusive licence arrangement with the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), USA.
The approach of closely collaborating with Toyota Australia and continuous improvement of its programs was “fundamentally crucial” to their successful development and implementation, Ms Groves says. “It did involve long, deep, frequent meetings, particularly at the start when it was pretty hard getting it right, and we had to do some significant program restructuring along the way.”
The programs “needed to be very customised and not be generic at all. It needed a high level of flexibility and a high level of Toyota focus”, she says.
Ms Groves cited the Looking Glass Experience as achieving some of the most substantial changes. The executives took the program in groups that mixed sales and marketing, management and corporate services, in a bid to foster greater understanding and tolerance. It healed divisions between Sydney and Melbourne, manufacturing and sales. “We came together as a company,” she says.
Looking Glass was also the most effective in making managers aware of the consequences of inaction. “That seemed to have the biggest impact in terms of people coming back and accepting more responsibility, more accountability, taking more risks, and leading from the front,” she says.
Looking Glass strengthened Toyota’s succession process; since completing the program, a number of participants had moved into senior leadership positions within the organisation, she says.
An innovation within the Toyota Leaders program was to have Toyota’s respected leaders be role models of the target behaviours, in a discussion forum facilitated by Mt Eliza. “That was a unique part of the program in that it acted like a safe space for these things to be talked about outside of the workplace,” Ms Groves says.
“Because we are very task and target focused, there is not a lot of time or space given for reflection about leadership and behaviours."
“That was very successful. People really appreciated the chance to get access to a respected Toyota person and to have a frank discussion as a group.”
Mt Eliza executive education’s relationship with Toyota continues, reinforcing the Toyota Way even more strongly by assisting Toyota to facilitate its own leadership programs.
