Leaders need to spend more time at the real touch points impacting customers and employees. Only then will they truly understand the real situation so that they can take effective actions to improve performance. And, being seen in Gemba only in crisis situations undermines its value and leaves a negative stain on it.

A team spends months on improving customer-facing branch processes of a bank. After benchmarking with sister companies across the world and after carefully mapping out process steps they come up with an improved flow that drastically reduces the processing time for branch customers. It surely looks like a nice success story. However, they get devastating […]