Walk the Line- The effective way to do a gemba walk

Most organizations become more efficient after adopting an improvement method,1 but many fail to radically transform their competitive positions or significantly alter the way they engage their employees.

Gemba walks can be a powerful improvement tool, but they must be done the right way. Gemba walks are typically defined as going to where the action is. They are a key element of the Toyota Production System. Every gemba walk is also a teaching exercise. The way questions are or are not asked has a big impact on employees and the responses given.

People at the worksite are also observing those doing the gemba walk. Questions are constantly going through their heads: "What does the leader want to know? If I share something that’s wrong, what will happen? Does this person really want to know what is happening?" So, the way the walk gets done is always important.

A Harvard Business Review article listed 10 fatal flaws that derail organizational leaders.2 Gemba walks can have a positive impact on each of the items in this list, especially a key point regarding how leaders fail to develop subordinates. "Instead, leaders focus on themselves, causing individuals and teams to disengage," the article’s authors said.3

In an e-mail exchange, Jeffrey Liker, professor of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan, said, "Doing a gemba walk has become a common lean practice, and people assume it’s simply going to thegemba to understand the work, be present, do some coaching; in other words, sort of a random walk to find problems."

All effective leaders take the following two steps, which are the primary purpose of most gemba walks:
1. Set direction with challenging targets.
2. Learn to more effectively see problems, abnormalities, waste and opportunities.

Great leaders move beyond the leadership basics in their gembawalks, however, and incorporate steps three, four and five. The additional three steps increase trust levels with employees and between cross-functional work groups. They serve as powerful change levers if incorporated into your gemba walks.
3. Teach and coach associates to develop their ability to perform and to fix and improve their processes.
4. Have the tenacity to stay the course, yet balance that drive with a humility that permits them to stay in touch with reality.
5. Align support systems to elevate the organization’s improvement maturity.

A respectful, effective gemba walk builds trust and lays the groundwork for a major transformation. It is amazing what you can learn during a walk.

Why do a gemba walk?
Gemba walks can serve as a powerful tool for leaders to drive alignment inside an organization. Metrics are important, but they are limited to things that are measureable. Much of what is important is not measureable—at least in the immediate moment—and is actually hidden beneath the surface. When you walk the gemba, you have an opportunity to see below the surface with your own eyes and more deeply understand what is really happening inside your organization.

Seeing up close the reality of how a process actually works versus conditioned assumptions can answer a host of questions that lead to new ideas for ways to develop people and major process improvements.

True industry leaders use gemba walk methods to empower an entire workforce for continuous operational improvement.
In Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming wrote, "Management by walking around is hardly ever effective."4 His reasoning was that someone in management who is walking around typically has little idea about what questions to ask and usually does not pause long enough at any point to get the right answer.

Deming, however, also stated quite clearly, "Most problems (85% to 95%) are system (process) problems, not people problems."5 Gemba walks provide a structured approach for assessing process performance and bringing key issues to the surface.

Doing the walk
During the on-floor, main part of a gemba walk, all walkers should practice active listening after respectfully asking probing questions. When you walk thegemba, you learn all the things you assume are happening but aren’t. An open-minded walker can gain many new insights.

For example, you might go to the floor to follow up on an injury and learn the entire new-hire training system is not being followed. Or, you might follow up on a defect and learn the cross-training standards are not being followed.

You will see firsthand whether the workers:
• Understand the purpose of their work.
• Understand and follow standard work practices.
• Use a scientific thought process for problem identification and root cause analysis.

It starts with going to see to gain a better understanding of the work being done.
Your first questions should focus on what:
• What is the primary purpose of this work activity (step)?
• What are the main work steps in this job/cell/functional area?
• How do you know that you are doing an effective job?
• How do you measure a successful work day?

After the walker has a basic understanding regarding the purpose of this work activity, why-type questions can be asked.
• Why is this the right way to do your job?
• Why do disruptions that impact the work flow happen?
• Why do backtracking, rework, redo loops and other wastes occur?

Show respect
When you ask why and have a blame-free culture, the truth comes out, along with all of the gaps. A well-framed question helps to develop people’s critical thinking skills. Importantly, questions should not be asked to prove people wrong. The best questions help the person discover the answer themselves.

All walks should help the leader learn what is really happening and, at the same time, focus on helping people maintain their dignity. This will only take place if leaders create a safe place to have a conversation and show respect to the people they encounter along the way.

Why would anyone openly discuss problems in a work area if he or she will be embarrassed if workplace problems are revealed or if the walker looks as if he or she is trying to catch someone doing something wrong?

While a department supervisor would concentrate on effective use of standard work practices during a gemba walk, the perspective of an executive visiting an operation for the first time should be to always show respect. Doing so sets the tone and expectations for whatever can or should happen next.

Disrespecting people during a gemba walk provides no real value. It makes the leader appear to be a bully and causes workers to hide problems and then try to show their situation in the most positive light to stay out of trouble.

Employee development
Helping people develop more critical thinking skills and raising their confidence and self-esteem are actually the ultimate forms of respect. It will enable your workforce to more passionately embrace improvement type behaviors.

Ideally, the walk should be used to develop the knowledge, skill and capability of your workers and help them to clearly see the process involved, understand comprehensively how it works, and identify problems or opportunities for improvement within it.

Ask how opportunities for improvement are handled, using the walk to increase trust levels:
• What do you typically do when a problem occurs?
• What countermeasures have you tried?
• What new countermeasures will you try next?
• How long will you test the solution (experiment) and what criteria will you use to determine whether the experiment is a success?
• Are other resources—quality, safety, maintenance or engineering, for example—needed to solve a problem?

When you see opportunities, your job becomes to coach the team members on how to capture them by helping them further develop their critical thinking skills.

The gemba walk can be used to encourage people to create an environment of experimentation and learning focused on reaching a desired future state level of accomplishment.

After the gemba walk
It’s highly likely you will need to make adjustments to the management support systems (communication, planning, and measurement, for example) and better align cross-functional cooperation to support the implementation and sustainment of improvements.

If this is an issue in your organization (and it usually is), have people from relevant support groups periodically participate in gemba walks. This is a great way to learn how effectively your support systems are operating and the impact they have—good or bad—on organizational performance.

Don’t try to do too much
It takes practice to perfect the gemba walk. You are unlikely to change the world with one stroll. The tool is more like a farmer planting seeds and waiting for them to grow than a tidal wave sweeping across the operation. Have some patience. If a sufficient number of seeds get planted, and they are watered and nurtured, there will be a harvest, but it will not happen overnight.
If people understand the underlying reason their work is necessary, they are in a much better position to find improvement opportunities. Developing more critical thinking skills should ultimately be the key purpose of any gemba walk. Lean transformations happen only if people transform.

Effectively done, gemba walks foster the development of a shared vision where people working together can accomplish performance improvements to make any organization more successful. When people co-own a vision, it is much stronger than nice words on a wall. Creating this type of environment should be the core purpose of any gemba walk.
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References
1. Michael Bremer and Brian McKibben, Escape the Improvement Trap, CRC Press, 2010.
2. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, "Ten Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders," Harvard Business Review, June 2009.
3. Ibid.
4. W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, MIT Press, paperback edition, 2000.
5. Ibid.

Article Reference: Quality Progress