Shu Ha Ri and Leadership

While it’s easy to see how shu ha ri applies to manual tasks like those on an assembly line, you might question how this approach works beyond the shop floor. Learning to be a leader is, of course, very different from learning to attach a bumper on a Corolla—leadership can’t be broken down into one-minute tasks (no matter how many copies of The One-Minute Manager are in circulation). But at Toyota, shu ha ri is the basic premise for the training and development of all workers, including leaders. We saw how Miyadera went through this learning cycle in engineering, and it is common for first-year engineers to work in production jobs for months and later to spend up to a year learning the computer-aided design (CAD) system, going through the cycle of shu ha ri.