Who We Are

Glenn Sommerville

Focused, passionate and results driven leader with national and international industry experience in aerospace, automotive, electronics manufacturing and supply chain.

Glenn is a lean and continuous improvement professional in the practices and philosophies of the Toyota Production System (TPS), trained and mentored on the shop floor in Japan by Toyota Senseis. Glenn has over 25 years of applied hands-on operational experience in executive leadership positions at companies such as Honeywell, Toyota, BlackBerry, and Amazon.

Throughout his career, Glenn has overcome multiple significant business challenges which has given him the experience and knowledge to lead and implement transformational change and continuous improvement, with a proven track record of success and results across multiple industries. His strong passion and obsession for leadership coaching and change management are two of Glenn's fundamental specialties. He believes that strong commitment to people and processes is the key to employee engagement and long-term success.

Glenn is a graduate of Ryerson University's Bachelor of Engineering program with a minor in Computer Science, is a licensed Professional Engineer and holds an MBA from Herriot-Watt University.

In his own words:

"I've had some really great challenges and opportunities over my career, and I have the scars to prove it! I've worked with some great and not so great leaders along the way too, learning equally from both kinds. To me, HPL is the next logical step in my progression towards personal fulfillment and achievement. Continuous improvement and coaching and mentoring others is what excites me and gets me up in the morning.

I was first introduced to 'lean' or continuous improvement at Honeywell. At that time, lean was a business 'initiative' that a lot of companies were jumping on. I found all these new Japanese terms were somewhat intimidating and at times daunting. However, I had an awesome opportunity to lead a business unit wide cultural transformation where I learned and experienced how to lead culture and change management while introducing lean principles.

During my 10 years as a General Manager at Toyota, I learned hands on how to 'do' and lead through the Toyota Way and the Toyota Production System (TPS). I learned the importance of and how to align leaders, management systems, and culture to achieve long term high performance. It's not a business initiative at all, or shouldn't be, but rather a way of leading.

Leading the launch of the first Lexus plant outside of Japan, the development of the 'Lexus Mindset' was a massive undertaking to gain the confidence of the Lexus dealer network across North America and prepare the entire automotive plant of 3,500 team members to exceed the customers' expectations of perfection, with every vehicle. Reward came from the customers themselves as the plant received the JD Power Gold Plant Award for the highest initial quality of any vehicle in North & South America. We were all very proud of that recognition!

BlackBerry was a fun and rewarding experience in introducing continuous improvement from scratch across a large organization and in multiple engineering, support, and traditional manufacturing teams. I learned to persevere, focus on making a difference every day, and continue to coach and mentor leaders throughout the organization while empowering them to try new things, fail, and succeed.

Amazon was all about scale and growth. The speed and scope of the business at Amazon taught me how to lead at scale. Growing the operation x10 in 5 years across the country while expanding the workforce from a few hundred to over 7,500 employees, I had to learn new ways of leading, managing and organizing myself, my team and my organization to be successful. I found that my biggest contribution was not doing, but rather coaching and mentoring others. It was an extremely challenging, but fulfilling experience.

I wanted to start HPL because of the passion I have for continuous improvement and the development of leaders. I have been privileged throughout my career to have worked for great companies and leaders that invested in my development and provided me with career and personal growth challenges. It is my desire to help other leaders grow and develop to realize their full potential. There is so much unrealized potential out there in leaders, people, and organizations and our goal at HPL is to disrupt that condition through our experience, programs, coaching, and peer communities!

I'm excited and honoured to partner with Scott, who has made it his life long commitment to help leaders and organizations learn lean and continuous improvement tools that make a difference in their workplaces everyday."