Management By Walking Around & Gemba

Driving incremental improvement in your process is not something that can be done without intimate personal engagement; not just from the owners of the process, but also from the organization’s leadership. A hands-off approach by management will doom the effort before it begins.

Management By Walking Around

Tom Peters, author of the “Excellence” series of books and one of my favorite management visionaries, coined the phrase MBWA (Management By Walking Around). This is another of those concepts that seem so obvious, but how many of us actually do this? This is a rhetorical question of course, but really, how often do we go out on the shop floor and just observe what is going on? I don’t mean tracking down orders and making sure people are working, but how does the facility look? Do the workers look happy? Are we working smart or overcompensating by working hard? What would I think if I were the customer? You can’t answer these questions sitting in your office!

Gemba

Mr. Peters was on to something with his MBWA, in fact the Japanese have a similar term for this; Gemba. Roughly translated as “the real place”, gemba means getting off your butt and going to see where the work is actually being done. Like many lean buzzwords such as kaizen, gemba has transitioned from obscure to ubiquitous across our industry. I love gemba, but like anything worthwhile, you get out of it what you put into it. Gemba demands a few things from the user to be successful.

First, it requires a deep curiosity to know what is really going on in your organization. Not what you think is going on, or what you heard is going on, but what is actually going on. Gemba next demands a skill set that includes the ability to actively observe and understand the work that’s being done. While this may seem obvious, doing a “drive by” surface observation won’t accomplish anything, and may actually do some damage by providing a false sense of process well-being. The last demand is perhaps the most important; an inherent respect for the people actually doing the work. These are your process experts that have the practical experience and tribal knowledge of the process. Gemba walks needs to be approached from a place of mutual respect and overriding desire to make things better, faster, cheaper, easier, etc. Gemba means going to where the work is being done and engaging the people directly, not assuming you have solved all the problems from your office.