LeanTech Gemba: How Toyota Does Leadership — and What Services & Tech can Learn

With guest speaker Monika Walker (ex-Toyota)

Toyota is admired for Lean, but its real strength is a leadership system that creates high-quality work, tight alignment to strategy, and continuous improvement as a daily habit — not an initiative.

Where Toyota has clear leadership roles and routines, Services and Tech often diffuse these responsibilities across Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and “self-organising teams.” The result is predictable: inconsistent quality, weak connection to strategic intent, and continuous improvement that never becomes part of the operating rhythm.

At Toyota, the team leader role provides the foundation. They:

• Uphold quality every day, not at the end of a process
• Keep teams focused on business outcomes and improving those outcomes
• Build reflection and problem-solving into the work
• Connect frontline teams with the wider organisational system so strategy is actually realised

In this session, Monika Walker (ex-Toyota) will unpack how Toyota develops leaders, how the team leader role functions in practice, and what Services and Tech must adapt if they want organisations that learn, improve, and deliver with reliability.

We’ll explore:

• How Toyota links leadership, quality, and strategy execution
• Why continuous improvement thrives there — and struggles elsewhere
• What structural and behavioural shifts would raise performance in Services & Tech environments

You’ll leave with practical insight into how leadership can create alignment, flow, and better outcomes — not by working harder, but by working in a better-designed system.