Group Leaders
At Toyota, these are the front-line supervisors who typically lead a group of four teams or 20 workers; called kumicho in Japanese (see illustration below).
A group leader’s duties, among others, include planning production, reporting results, coordinating improvement activities, scheduling vacation and manpower, developing team members, testing process changes, and performing daily audits of team leaders to make sure they have done their standard work audits of team members. They also do a weekly Five S audit of their teams’ work areas.
