Gemba walks are a popular lean tool, but whether they are an effective lean tool depends a lot on how and why leaders conduct gemba walks, and what actions they take afterwards.

For example, effective gemba walks are not audits. They are not showcases of leadership presence or expertise, and they certainly are not management by walking around.

Instead, gemba walks are effective only when leaders use them to learn with curiosity and humility, say the hosts of the Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement podcast.

With this podcast installment, hosts John Dyer and Dr. Mohamed Saleh launch a new series of episodes exploring key behaviors that determine the effectiveness of well-known lean and continuous improvement tools. This episode's lean tool: gemba walks. 

What follows are several excerpts from the full episode.

Gemba Walk Definition

Saleh: “Gemba means going to the actual place where the work happens … So going to the work itself, understanding the conditions, and learning from the people closest to it. The word gemba itself is only a location. The behavior behind it is curiosity, and so curiosity is the behavior that makes this tool actually work.”

Gemba Walks Done Wrong

Dyer: “The biggest one in my mind is the ‘check the box’ mentality. At some point the leader has heard management by walking around or that gemba is a good thing. Maybe they read that in a book, so they go out onto the shop floor or wherever the work is being done, and they shake a few hands and ask about how the family's doing, and then walk away, and the box gets checked. Nothing changes. Nothing. No curiosity is taking place. No communication is taking place. But the leader then says, ‘Well, hey, I do gemba walks. So, so that's the benign one.”

Dyer: "There's obviously the negative one, where the leader comes out and starts to criticize. You know, Oh, why is this so bad? Why is this so messy? Why is this so not cleaned up? And people then build defense walls. And so every time they see the leader, their initial reaction is to pipe down, be quiet, don't share a thing, because you don't want to get in trouble.”

See Also: Gemba Focused Leader: The Second Leadership Characteristic for Lasting Change

Important Leadership Behaviors

Saleh: “The leader's intent has to come from a place of curiosity.”

Dyer: “There's a tremendous amount of humbleness that goes along with this. Because curiosity means that you don't know everything, and that you want to learn. That's really what curiosity is all about, is how can I learn? To learn means you don't know everything, and that takes a tremendous amount of humbleness.”

Saleh: “Sometimes we use the tool without thinking about the behavior, but the tool itself is activated through a principle, right? And in this case, it's humility or leading with humility.”

Saleh: “I had a leader, and I might have mentioned her in a few episodes. Her name was Donna, and Donna did what I would call a role model gemba walk… I learned a lot from her around humility. And there's a few things that caught my attention that I have now prescribed as kind of my, I would call ‘checkpoints’ to see if a leader that I'm observing is doing this correctly or not.

“And the first one is they observe before speaking. Donna was really good at that. They ask open-ended questions, and for our listeners, if you're asking questions that result in a yes or a no or a defense, then you have a problem there. She used to listen without interrupting anyone, and even when they're done, she would, I would call it let them empty their bucket, over there. She's like, okay, go on, and they would talk more. She was really good about separating facts from assumptions.

“The other thing that she did is she admits when she doesn't understand something, and so there's a level of humility that I think was really powerful. One of the things that I struggled with early in my career that she did very well (is) she resisted the urge to immediately solve a problem, because we all have those capes that we want to solve the problem, and she was masterful about resisting. … And the one thing that I think distinguished her from many leaders that I observed during that time was she thanked people for exposing problems, and many of us at gemba walks are not keen to do that.

See Also: More Warning Signs That Your Lean Initiative Is Going Off The Rails

“And she used very powerful questions that I actually use as guides now for the people I coach because they really resonated for me. She would ask questions like, ‘Tell me more’. … ‘Okay, go on. Help me understand what should be happening here.’”

Follow-Up Required

Dyer: “It's more than just going to the gemba. It's more than just being curious. It's more than just asking the right questions. It's what is the follow-up to a lot of these things? And I think that what gets people really frustrated is that … hey, the leader’s coming out and they're doing it all the right way. They're asking the right questions … but nothing seems to change. Nothing seems to get any better. So that's the other part of all this.

“Before starting the gemba walks, you got to make sure there is some sort of pathway, some sort of mechanism in place that allows these great inputs to be turned into either concrete action items or the ability to research whether it's a viable issue or not, a viable improvement idea or not, and then either communicate to the person that hey, this is a great idea and we're going to implement it or this is a great idea … but it just doesn't fit our future vision of where we're headed so we're not going to consider it at this point.”

Back to Curiosity

Saleh: “When you walk around, don't scrutinize people. It's not the leader's opportunity to display their expertise, and this is not their time to shine. It's the other way around, actually. It is a disciplined practice of learning where value is created."

Saleh: “Curiosity is really what distinguishes this tool.”