Group leaders

At Toyota, these are the frontline supervisors who usually lead a group of four teams or 20 employees. In Japanese, they are called kumicho . 

Group leaders' duties include planning production, reporting results, coordinating improvement activities, scheduling days off and manpower, developing team members, testing process changes, and auditing team leaders daily to make sure they in turn have performed their standard work audits of team members. They also conduct weekly 5S audits of their teams' work areas. 

An example of the place of group leaders within a typical responsibility chain: