Supervisor development – empowering teams and shaping a resilient lean culture

Join us for an engaging and interactive one-day workshop where you and your team will build bicycles while experimenting with safer, more efficient work methods. All bicycles assembled during the day will be donated to a charitable cause, making your participation both a learning experience and a meaningful contribution to others.

Set in a simulated company environment, this hands-on session mirrors real-world challenges such as front-line team engagement, onboarding and training, and the development of operating systems for scalable growth. It’s a chance to step into the everyday reality of leaders and team members striving to create stability, capability, and improvement - together.

In this hands-on session, you’ll explore a practical and people-centered approach to supervisor development - strengthening your ability to coach, lead, and improve processes in ways that foster stronger teams, greater inclusion, and long-term resilience.

Through repeated improvement cycles, you’ll experience what it means to empower individuals while continuously enhancing your organization’s ability to adapt and thrive.

The workshop is designed to help leaders at all levels address the human side of change by building trust, capability, and clarity into daily work. You’ll gain insight into how strong leadership habits and structured routines can unlock innovation, collaboration, and ownership - even in fast-moving or complex environments.

Throughout the session, we’ll introduce two foundational frameworks that support these leadership capabilities:

• Training within industry (TWI) provides practical routines for teaching job skills, strengthening relationships, and improving job methods - helping organizations build consistency, quality, and people engagement into their daily operations
• Toyota kata builds on these foundations with a repeatable improvement and coaching routine. It enables teams and leaders to navigate the unknown with confidence, using a scientific and goal-oriented approach that supports learning and improvements - step by step

These approaches are deeply aligned with the Toyota culture and its people system, where the role of leaders is to develop people through daily coaching, clear standards, and deliberate practice. By embedding these routines into your organization, you are not just optimizing performance - you are cultivating a culture where people are respected, trusted, and continuously supported in their development.

Together, these methods help organizations shape lean cultures where both people and performance grow stronger. They enable supervisors to support operational transformation with human insight, and to use practical tools that improve safety, reduce variation, improve efficiency and accuracy, and drive sustainable improvement at every level.

Led by experienced BTP Enablers—John Vellema, Thomas Ilskov, and Ben Hoseus—you’ll leave with new capabilities, deeper understanding, and the confidence to lead improvement through people, purpose, and practice.

This is more than a workshop—it’s an opportunity to strengthen your leadership, connect with others, and make a lasting difference.

This workshop is designed for a diverse group of participants, including:

• Executives, managers, directors, and eaders looking to foster a culture of continuous improvement
• Coaches and trainers aiming to develop skill sets for problem-solving and leadership
• Lean leaders, HR leaders, and key managers involved in shaping their organization’s culture
• Anyone seeking to enhance their skills in coaching, problem-solving, and process improvement

By participating in this workshop, you will not only gain valuable skills but also contribute to a meaningful cause—connecting people, purpose, and progress in a way that truly reflects the AME spirit.

• Experience a realistic, hands-on environment simulating frontline challenges such as onboarding, training, and continuous improvement—while building bicycles for a charitable cause
• Learn practical leadership routines to develop, support, and coach team members effectively—built on the principles of training within industry (TWI)
• Gain tools to build a resilient lean culture through daily coaching and deliberate practice using the Toyota kata improvement and coaching patterns
• Understand how to embed people-centered systems into operations that foster ownership, consistency, and sustainable growth across all levels of the organization
• Walk away with actionable skills you can immediately apply to empower teams, improve processes, and lead with purpose—while making a meaningful contribution to the community

This workshop is designed to be highly interactive, with approximately 70-80% of the time dedicated to hands-on activities, team-based exercises, and real-time application. Participants will work in a simulated company environment, assembling bicycles as a way to explore real-world challenges related to onboarding, frontline leadership, and continuous improvement. All bicycles built during the day will be donated to charity, adding meaningful purpose to the learning experience.

First Interactive Exercise and Workshop Flow
The first interactive exercise begins approximately 30 minutes into the session, as participants start assembling bicycles in teams. This is followed by a second round to establish a baseline in terms of process performance, team coordination, and leadership behavior.

After these two initial rounds, all teams rotate through three dedicated learning stations, each focusing on a core component of supervisor development:

• TWI job instruction (JI) – how to train team members effectively
• TWI job relations (JR) – how to build trust and handle people challenges
• TWI job methods (JM) – how to improve jobs safely, efficiently, and with quality in mind

Each team will experience all three focus areas in rotation, applying and reflecting on new practices during each station.

At Business Through People (BTP), we help organizations create sustainable success by building strong people systems. We believe that individuals and teams—when enabled with the right mindset, skills, and support—hold the key to lasting improvement, innovation, and resilience.

We specialize in globally certified programs within training within industry (TWI) and Toyota kata. These structured, hands-on methods build leadership, coaching, and problem-solving capabilities — strengthening safety, quality, adaptability, and performance across industries and cultures.

All programs follow global certification standards and include:
- Small groups (6–10 participants) for deep, focused learning
- Practical training applied to real work tasks—no PowerPoint
- Certification levels: Basic Training, Facilitator, and Train-the-Trainer
- Consistent content and delivery across sites, languages, and regions

Our approach is more than training. Through our enabling process, we co-develop systems and routines with our clients to embed continuous improvement into daily operations—ensuring ownership, standardization, and cultural anchoring.

At the heart of everything we do are our core values:

• People – We believe there must always be room for people’s diverse needs, desires, and dreams. With this, ownership and sustainable success will follow.
• Learning – We never stop developing. With curiosity and energy, we strive for mastery and embrace new ways of thinking.
• Servant Leadership – We grow others through coaching, listening, and enabling people to succeed through responsibility and care.
• Courage – We dare to challenge ourselves, our clients, and each other—with integrity and with people’s best interest in mind.

With over a decade of experience across five continents and more than 2,500 certified leaders and team members, we remain committed to one vision:

Help you create sustainable Business Through People. https://btp.dk/

Thomas Ilskov is a Master Enabler and Regional Partner for the Nordic region at Business Through People ApS, with over 10 years of experience applying TWI methods in various work environments.

His primary focus is on integrating training within industry methods from traditional manufacturing into administrative and support functions. Thomas has successfully applied these tools in banking and public sector administrative work. Throughout his career in the service sector, he has worked on improvements in customer care and sales organizations, demonstrating the effectiveness of job instruction and job methods in administrative settings.

For the past three years, he has provided clients worldwide with TWI methodologies, helping them enhance their operations wherever standardization is needed.

John Vellema is the Founder and Senior Master Enabler of Business Through People ApS, established in 2012. With a commitment to honest, caring, and straightforward communication, John fosters strong relationships with his clients and colleagues.

Renowned as one of the foremost training within industry senior master enablers, he excels in coaching senior leadership to cultivate effective leadership systems. Before founding his company, John made significant contributions to the LEGO Group, where he played a key role in implementing a global job training organization across their manufacturing sites. His experiences are captured in his acclaimed book, Building a Global Learning Organization: Using TWI to Succeed with Strategic Workforce Expansion in the LEGO Group, which received a Shingo Publication Prize.

As an external Enabler, John has developed a portfolio of successful TWI cases worldwide, earning respect for his humble yet impactful coaching style.