Excellence Isn’t an Accident: Mentorship as the Engine of Mastery 

Toyota has always understood something many organizations miss: if you want to create world-class products, first you must develop world-class people. For more than 30 years, Toyota has consistently delivered the highest levels of quality, sales, and profitability in one of the most competitive industries on the planet. That isn’t an accident. It is the result of a culture of discipline, craftsmanship, and the pursuit of mastery at every level of the organization.

New engineers are assigned a mentor from the beginning of their careers.

Toyota’s dedication to this pursuit was memorably articulated to me early in my first multi-year research study of Toyota by Kunihiko (Mike) Massaki, then president of the Toyota Technical Center, when he said, “We develop people and products simultaneously.” I went on to find that principle woven into the DNA of the Toyota development system. Central to that is mentoring.

Beyond applied science

Too often, people think of engineering as applied science, but that is far too narrow. Real-world engineering blends science, art, and intuition built from many years of experience.  These tacit skills are difficult to codify and must be transferred over time through close observation, guided practice, mistakes, and reflection. It is the master–apprentice model renewed for the modern, global organization to pass deep competence and capability generation to generation.

As Rudyard Kipling wrote, “The strength of the pack is the wolf, the strength of the wolf is the pack.” Great teams like Toyota totally embody this truth: people help each other reach levels none could achieve on their own.

Mentors who helped shape me

Like many of you, I’ve been shaped by mentors who instilled important and sometimes difficult lessons that are impossible to get from a book:

Albert Stoltz, a master machinist under whom I served a portion of my apprenticeship, taught me about precision, mastery, and the importance of “knowing your stuff.” 

Bill Morison taught me about leader standard work, professionalism, and creating an environment where people could do their best when I was a young plant manager. 

Derick Kuzak, who embodied “knowing your stuff,” set a high bar when I was an engineering director and showed me how to organize seemingly random bits of data into a coherent picture.

Finally, Alan Mullaly, former Ford CEO, taught me what “people first” leadership really means, both through his example and our bi-monthly 1:1 meeting discussions. 

Mentoring in Toyota engineering

While my experiences were the result of happenstance, my own persistence, and the generosity of my mentors, Toyota’s system is far more deliberate, intentional, and far-reaching. At Toyota, this work is not left to chance. Mentoring is a fundamental and critical part of leadership; it is a basic expectation. New engineers are assigned a mentor from the beginning of their careers. This person helps them acquire the critical skills of their discipline while simultaneously modeling behaviors of the Toyota Way in product development.   

… he created learning lines where participants, under the watchful eyes of experienced people, had to manually do what the automated machines did.

New engineers also often start out with a “freshman project.” This project is, or at least was, a bit of a watershed moment for them. Many senior engineering leaders can recall the details of this project decades after the fact. Novice engineers are asked to improve some aspect of product development that is unfamiliar to them. The task, undertaken under the watchful eye of their mentor, can make the new engineer uncomfortable, stretch their problem-solving capability, and their initiative. The goal is mastery of a particular discipline, and this can take many years. This is not just true in engineering, but all across Toyota.

Mitsuru Kawai: a global mentor

Few stories illustrate Toyota’s philosophy better than that of Mitsuru Kawai. We met him on our last visit to Toyota in Japan. Kawai-san is extraordinary even by Toyota standards. He started on the production line and rose to EVP and a board member.

He started his career under the mentorship of Taiichi Ohno, the legendary father of the Toyota Production System. Kawai-san absorbed not just techniques, but Ohno’s way of thinking, and he carried those lessons forward for decades. Just one example is his 2 percent productivity improvement at Toyota’s Honsha plant every month for decades. 

But for the purposes of this post, I want to focus on another thing he learned from Ohno: the importance of mentoring the next generation of Toyota team members. Kawai was concerned that the level of automation at Toyota manufacturing plants was limiting people’s ability to see waste and improve value creation. He felt that many of the newer members lacked an understanding of what was going on inside the machines.   

Great leaders don’t just deliver results—they ensure the next generation can deliver even better results.

Consequently, he created learning lines where participants, under the watchful eyes of experienced people, had to manually do what the automated machines did. He also asked engineers and workers alike to hand-draw what was happening inside machines and then explain their drawings and propose ways to improve the internal processes.

Later in his career, Kawai became responsible for teaching leaders how to develop more Toyota leaders worldwide. He created “super skill lines” where experienced — sometimes even retired — workers could mentor newer members and effectively transfer and improve their skills. His team created highly skilled mentors who could fan out across the globe and mentor the next generation of team members. 

Kawai’s passion for developing the next generation, along with his direct, hands-on approach, demonstrates Toyota’s commitment and method for developing people through mentoring and learning by doing. Toyota turned this commitment into a methodology that worked.

Mentoring is leadership

The lesson here is straightforward but easy to overlook: mentorship is not something you do in addition to your many other leadership responsibilities. It’s not an extracurricular activity; it is leadership.

Great leaders don’t just deliver results—they ensure the next generation of leaders can deliver even better results. This happens through ongoing, dedicated coaching, guiding, modeling, and challenging others to grow beyond their current limits.

A closing thought

When we look at Toyota’s incredible record of quality and performance, it can be tempting to see it as some elusive, complex formula. But step closer, and you’ll see it is simpler yet more profound: it is, as Masaki-san said, a process of developing people and products simultaneously.

Excellence isn’t an accident. It’s the byproduct of mastery, achieved by learning from those more experienced, carried forward one generation at a time; embedded in the way the work is done.

So, whoever you are—engineer, team member, coach, student, or executive—remember: Be a mentor. Seek a mentor. Make mentoring part of how you work, every day. That’s how you build enduring excellence.