Take a Gemba Walk to Understand Your Teams and Learn the ‘Actual Place’ They Are In

Many leaders are familiar with the concept of a gemba walk. This six-sigma concept is based on the idea that if you walk through a factory floor, talk to the workers, understand the processes, you will understand your operations better. You will have a better strategy, anticipate issues and recognise opportunities sooner. The idea is to go where the work is really happening. The more senior a leader you are, the more removed you become from where the actual production occurs. You risk losing perspective, too distant from the day-to-day to properly anticipate the longer-term needs. I have spent my career focused on the organizational health of a company, focusing on leadership and team development. And I think that a gemba walk with talent is just as vital and I invite leaders to do the same with their teams.

Here is why leaders will build better teams by going where their people ‘actually’ are.

Genba is Japanese for ‘the actual place’ (it has been frequently westernised into gemba, and I’ll use them interchangeably here). In the traditional use, genba applies to any literal interpretation of actual place. Detectives could refer to a crime scene as genba or journalists would say they are reporting from the genba. The idea of the gemba walk is the same concept, but with a specific purpose for being in that place. You do a gemba walk in the actual place with a purpose of gathering information you otherwise couldn’t. And that information will be applied against a specific problem, or opportunity.

My clients are either C-suite members who are already leading organisations, or next-gen executives and leaders on track for C-suite roles. And while the individual challenges they face vary from person to person, I often find problems comes from a gap between the leader and the team. This is not surprising—most individuals at this level are ultimately responsible for teams of teams. Even their direct reports are often scattered around the world. They are not physically in the same room with them. And their connections and conversations can easily become tactical and even transactional. So how to build real relationships and shared values? Get to the actual place where your teams are.

Leaders must understand that everyone is informed by their schemata. You can’t overcome it. Gemba walks with your team can help you realise it.

This means more of a mindset of observing and accepting the experience and values of team members, without translating that experience. When we see someone do something different, our instinct is to say, ‘oh, that’s their version of our this’. This is actually an instinctive psychological response, in part because of a concept called schema. Schema is simply beliefs and values that we hold due to personal (individual) experiences and social (group or cultural) norms around us. This just means in some places in the world it would be incredibly rude to enter a home with shoes on. In some places in the world it would be incredibly typical to eat meatloaf. What is ‘normal’ to us is so often simply what is familiar. But it is so familiar, and within our own context so normalised as to seem universal. We build very rigid beliefs around how the world works, including the world of work. Our self-schema is powerful and in the workplace, schema can impact everything from productivity to self-worth.

To have a gemba walk amongst our teams and visit where they actually are we have to fight confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is our need to reframe what we don’t know into a lens that is familiar. We usually do this by depending on different schemata. A schema is essentially relying on beliefs or experience to help interpret new information. Role schema, for example, is having certain expectations of people based on their role. We might have certain beliefs about how a minister or a police officer “should” behave. Or it can be an event schema, as in this is how one should behave in certain circumstances. For example, for the average Westerner a bow in Japan equals a handshake in England. That is because it’s the fastest, easiest common denominator for someone who is from England to ‘understand’ a bow. What you are really doing is pulling something unknown into a context that you understand, which is a version of confirmation bias. We look for the familiar, and we will reshape the unfamiliar to confirm our schemata.

If you could resist the schema that says a bow is like a handshake, you would be able to see the nuance of a bow. There are rules about bowing in Japan: who bows first, how deeply, and who stops bowing first. All of those rules are deeply significant—and there is no equivalence in a handshake. If you can stop trying to make that like this, you can get closer to the actual place where others are.

What would being in the actual place with teams feel like? (Not look like.)

People want to feel seen. Notice I said feel seen, not be seen. Being seen means someone looked at you. Feeling seen really means feeling recognised—and in the workplace that only can happen if leaders are listening. When you engage with people, listen more than speak, and find a personal connection, you create a baseline level of trust. The harder it is to find an obvious personal connection, the lower the initial trust. Think about this simply: if you meet someone who shares your background or your experience or both, it’s easy to connect. They reflect back the same choices in life or personal reference points that you have. Back when companies were smaller, and customers were local, and everyone was rowing in the same direction, it made sense. If you and I open a bakery in Chicago and we’re both Italian-American, and so is the neighbourhood and so are our suppliers, then sure, you have an advantage to share similar outlooks.

But if you’re reading this, I suspect you’ve got large scale teams dispersed around the world. You don’t even use the same word for bakery, or eat the same pastries, let alone…ok, you get my point.

You might have learned in business school to think outside the box. But more likely, you need to take a walk around inside someone else’s box.

With people, it is infinitely more complex than oversimplifying a handshake. And in fact, it’s impossible to fully understand another’s culture, especially within the limited context of professional interactions. The goal is not for the leader to understand all the nuance of another place, but to understand their inability to do so. The exercise is not to come away fully informed, but aware of blind spots. A lot of inclusion goals really comes down to this: you may not understand the experience of someone else, but you can learn that it is very different from yours, in large ways and small ones, some of which are incredibly impactful on major life decisions.

Use what you learn to lead better.

The insights you gather from a gemba for people aren’t just for understanding—they’re for action. By learning what your team needs and what motivates them, you can make more informed decisions about how to support them. Whether it’s providing additional training, improving workflows, or simply acknowledging their hard work, your leadership becomes more grounded in the realities your team faces. The gemba walk isn’t just about fixing problems—it’s about understanding. And when you apply this to your people, you move from being a distant leader to being someone who truly knows and cares for your team. By walking alongside them, not just managing from a distance, you forge stronger relationships, build trust, and foster a more engaged and motivated workforce.

This article first appeared on The Robert Kovach Blog.

Dr. Robert Kovach has spent his entire career working as a trusted advisor to senior leaders wanting to improve the effectiveness of themselves, their teams and their companies. Prior to starting his own consulting firm, Robert led the global executive assessment and development team for Cisco. Earlier in his career Robert held leadership roles with RHR International, PepsiCo, Ashridge Executive Education, Hult International Business School and the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.