Lessons from Communication Mistakes at Toyota
To many, the problems Toyota have faced over the last several months were simply the result of flawed workmanship or a rush to get products to market without thoroughly quality testing them. But if you dig through the product complaints, you quickly realize there may a deeper issue in this whole mess: communication.
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During testimony before Congress, Yoshimi Inaba, COO of Toyota Motor North America and CEO Toyota Sales USA, admitted that "cross-regional defective information" wasn't shared within the organization. "When you go to a specific database, you can find it. But it is not – I must say, I don't know it very well," he said.
Though complaints had already been coming in from the U.S., Europe and China, dots weren't connected because there was no effective system for sharing the information across the different regions in which Toyota operates.
The inability to communicate within a company is not unique to Toyota, nor is it unique to companies the size of Toyota. Within every company there is the potential for communication to break down, and while the results may not be as extreme as what happened with Toyota, the results can prevent your company from doing its best work.
For example, do your employees have a way to communicate to you processes that can be improved? Or do they keep those ideas to themselves because of the potential rewards for individual productivity?
When I first graduated college, I worked for a bank in its records department. At the time, the most important thing for much of management was that we individually met specific process goals, and the top processor was rewarded. As a result, few people were willing to share the "tricks of the trade" that helped them be more productive because they wanted the reward.
When the policy shifted to focus on departmental process and meeting customer service goals, the culture changed. Suddenly it was very important for everyone to know best practices. Information hoarding became a rarity.
In December 2004, Gates Corp.'s Justin Aschenbrenner wrote for MDM: "You know that mistakes are going to happen. You don't punish a person for doing what he thought was right because you didn't communicate the correct information." (Read Best Practice: Gates Corporation.)
With accessibility to technology today, implementing ways to share information - even if it means just training the right people on how to use an already existing database, as was the issue at Toyota - can be a relatively painless process.
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