What Toyota Looks for in Future Leaders

What are the qualities of a leader? How do you identify a future leader? These are questions that challenge every manufacturer and, indeed, any company that is trying to set itself up for enduring success.

Toyota Material Handling North America President and CEO Brett Wood recently shared a slice of his company’s learnings on this topic as a keynote speaker at the IndustryWeek Operations Leadership Summit, held in Indianapolis in late June.

Wood, who is also senior executive officer at Toyota Industries Corp., set the tone that manufacturing is a people business when he stated early on: “Making things is about making people.”

His keynote presentation touched on the myriad ways in which Toyota puts people and culture at the forefront of the organization and concluded with what the manufacturer looks for in future leaders. This is the first of two articles on Wood’s keynote, and it focuses on the young leadership piece.

“If you’ve got the best team around you, your world is so much better,” Wood told the conference audience. “So, here's what we look for in our future leaders. Something that hopefully you can take one or two takeaways from.”

• Be passionately curious. “We love to hire people that just want to learn and ask a lot of questions,” explained Wood. And if they are interested in exploring departments within Toyota outside of their current position, “The advice I give them is, ‘Be open with your management team about your willingness to try other areas.’”

Wood peppered his advice with his own experiences within Toyota. For example, “Attend other meetings,” he said, sharing how early in his Toyota Material Handling career he took opportunities to sit in a lot of meetings. Was he a guest? Yes. Did he contribute? Not necessarily. “But I learned a lot.”

• Prepare…then prepare again. Be organized. “I can walk into a meeting and pretty much know who's prepared and who's not,” Wood said. “I talk about being prepared all the time, and I love it when I see new hires, future leaders, hopefully, that are really organized.”
• Be flexible. Similar to No. 1: “I love it when I see someone … when the opportunity comes up, they say, ‘I’ll try that.’ … That’s a person I know is going to do well in our environment.”
• Be a good listener. It’s a piece of advice shared in every leadership book and “is largely self-explanatory,” Wood says. “And if you're hiring people, you can tell right away, during an interview, how good a listener are they, and I just encourage you as leaders and managers to kind of get your ‘spider senses’ out on someone when you're meeting them for the first time.”
• Differentiate yourself. “Be different. I like someone that’s different,” Wood noted, citing as examples the first person in the office, the last person to leave, the person who brings doughnuts. “That person usually stands out in a crowd.”  Wood also shared an example from his own past, when he had the opportunity to meet, along with many others, a company leader who could advance his career. He made what could be called a risky claim while shaking hands with the leader, but it got him invited to dinner with that leader.  Luckily, he was able to provide some support for his initial claim. “I look back at that moment I took a risk.”  
• Be patient and resilient. The road to success is never a straight line. “I'm a great example of it. My career went sideways,” Wood said. “For yourselves, a lateral move is sometimes even better than a promotion,” because it gives you experience, he said.

Wood speaks from personal experience. Earlier in his career, the company was moving him into a different role every two years, and as a result he left projects undone in the role he shifted away from. Don’t worry, his wife told him, “Someone’s got a vision for you.”

“And now I can pretty much walk into any meeting at Toyota and know what’s going on,” he said.

• Be a good corporate citizen. At Toyota, “It's pretty much a rule that you have to contribute to society in some way.” Toyota gives everyone in the company two paid days off annually to work on a charity. For factory workers who may find it difficult to take a day off, the company has created a “community room,” where they can come during lunch breaks and pack backpacks, blankets, or whatever the human resources team has set up. “It's turned into a really great bonding experience for a lot of them, and then they feel like they're contributing to the local community without having to even leave the factory.”
• Show charisma. “One of my favorite thoughts about charisma, is people won't remember what you said. People won't remember what you really did, sometimes. They're going to remember how you made them feel,” Wood said. “Our future leaders, they [had] better just be bouncing around the office saying, 'I'm so happy to be here' … Negative energy is contagious. So is positive energy. Positive energy really spreads around.”