Features
The Biodiversity of Toyota Optimization
Carmen M. Carter, 09-17-2008
Toyota Motor Corp. understands diversity is essential to long-term business success. The company's diversity statement for 2008 emphasizes its commitment to nurturing inclusion as a means to secure competitive advantage and help promote collaboration amidst the enterprise's various employee backgrounds and experiences.
Diversity is one of Toyota's top 10 business initiatives, and the goal is to continue to foster best practices in every aspect of the business, including employment, dealers, procurement, communications and advertising and philanthropy.
The organization has built its reputation for quality on a fractal paradigm of continuous improvement and respect for people. In doing so, Toyota harnesses the same sweet spot of process and culture at the core of superperformance.
"Superperformance" is operationally defined as "companies who produce and sustain industry-outperforming return on investment over time - for at least a dozen years." Long-term success is the most elusive form of outperformance, and the most valuable. Based on this discovery, optimization consultant Dave Guerra wrote Superperformance: New Profound Knowledge for Corporate Leaders that explains the concept, traces its underlying scientific basis and industrial universality and proposes eight rules to replicate that same sweet spot in any organization.
The book names 10 companies, including Toyota, that have achieved this distinction and traces their physiology and spirit to find the pattern and see it at work. It references the Toyota production system, as well as the Toyota Way - the complementary strand in Toyota's DNA that blends with management and leadership.
Along with a fully awake left and right brain, superperformers leverage their respective organizational living ecosystems to take diversity to a new level. Across all of these outperformers there is an energetic and expanding diversity that can better be labeled as a sort of biodiversity.
This biodiversity does not just embrace different people. It embraces different approaches, ideas and experiences. Intellectual diversity, for example, is one facet. Optimization occurs where this expanded expression - informed by a living, complex adaptive systems view of organizational diversity - is encouraged and exploited.
For Toyota, diversity is not just a social responsibility, it's a business imperative. In 2001, the company launched the Toyota Diversity Strategy, a 10-year, multibillion-dollar sustainable commitment based on minority participation, equal opportunity and inclusion. As part of the strategy, Toyota implemented a mentoring program, its Diversity Champions program.
The Diversity Champions program at Toyota Motor Sales operates separately from human resources. It's run by a five-person diversity consulting and inclusion strategies unit that works collaboratively with the University of Toyota and outside consultants to develop training programs.
Candidates who prove themselves as outstanding employees with leadership skills are nominated by managers and co-workers to participate. Any Toyota employee can be tapped for this role. Groups of 10 to 12 champions at a time begin their training at an intensive three-day seminar at company headquarters. After the first three days of training, champions return to their sponsoring work units for three to four weeks.
Then they return to the university for more training. They are responsible for analyzing their workplace and developing action plans based on responses to questions such as: "What's going well in this unit? How much are people involved and engaged? Is there understanding and communication?"
Champions also meet informally once every two months to discuss subjects ranging from new communication tools to best practices. They gather at headquarters once a year for a formal summit and are required to submit a written report of the research they have conducted on their work cultures.
At Toyota, diversity and inclusion are among the top priorities, said Jerome Miller, vice president of diversity for Toyota Motor Sales. They are "integral to our business strategy and surely contribute to our company's success. Our diversity champions promote inclusion and leverage workforce diversity at the grassroots level - that's where meaningful progress occurs."
Carmen M. Carter is a senior diversity adviser and partner for Corpus Optima, an improvement company specializing in organizational superperformance. She can be reached at editor@diversity-executive.com.
