Supervisor development – empowering teams and shaping a resilient lean culture

Join BTP 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, BTP will 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 leaders 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.

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.

Throughout the day, Toyota Kata is used as the guiding coaching routine. Each team selects a team leader who practices using the coaching kata to support learning and improvement in the group. This structure ensures participants not only gain technical tools but also develop leadership and coaching skills through real-time feedback and reflection.

The workshop concludes with two or three final rounds of bicycle building, where teams apply what they've learned from the TWI stations and kata coaching routines. These rounds highlight measurable improvements in safety, quality, teamwork and efficiency — bringing the learning full circle and reinforcing the value of structured, people-centered improvement.

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.

The company specializes 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

BTP's approach is more than training. Through its enabling process, the company co-develops systems and routines with its clients to embed continuous improvement into daily operations — ensuring ownership, standardization and cultural anchoring.

At the heart of everything BTP does are its core values:

• People: BTP believes there must always be room for people’s diverse needs, desires and dreams. With this, ownership and sustainable success will follow.
• Learning: BTP never stops developing. With curiosity and energy, the company strives for mastery and embrace new ways of thinking.
• Servant leadership: BTP grows others through coaching, listening and enabling people to succeed through responsibility and care.
• Courage: The BTP team dares to challenge themselves, their 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, BTP remains committed to one vision:
Help you create sustainable Business Through People.

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. Ilskov 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, Vellema 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, Vellema 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, Vellema has developed a portfolio of successful TWI cases worldwide, earning respect for his humble yet impactful coaching style.