To bridge the growing gap between leadership and individual contributors, executives should actively participate in their team's tasks. Taking a support ticket, sitting in on a sprint, or pair programming serves as a "Gemba walk" that provides firsthand experience and maintains an empathetic connection.

A new CEO’s first few months are best spent gathering unfiltered information directly from employees and customers across the business. Avoid the trap of sitting in an office listening to prepared presentations. Instead, actively listen in the field, then act decisively based on those firsthand insights.

When a team is struggling, a micromanager gives the answer. An effective hands-on leader resists making the decision. Instead, they intervene to teach the team the correct *method* for arriving at the decision, thereby improving the organization's long-term capabilities.

To move beyond static playbooks, treat your team's ways of working (e.g., meetings, frameworks) as a product. Define the problem they solve, for whom, and what success looks like. This approach allows for public reflection and iterative improvement based on whether the process is achieving its goal.

A leader's job doesn't end after designing a process. They must actively and continuously teach and reinforce the company's methods, especially as new people join. The goal is to ensure the right things happen even when the leader isn't present.

Feedback often gets 'massaged' and politicized as it travels up the chain of command. Effective leaders must create direct, unfiltered channels to hear from customers and front-line employees, ensuring raw data isn't sanitized before it reaches them.

Mandating new processes, like reducing meetings, is ineffective if the collective beliefs driving old behaviors (e.g., lack of trust) are not addressed. To make change stick, leaders must first surface, discuss, and realign the team's shared assumptions to support the new structure.

Kaizen, typically associated with manufacturing lines, is a powerful change system for any business process. By mapping the flow and identifying wasted time or communication, it can dramatically improve efficiency in areas like sales, accounting, or finance, as demonstrated by a two-week quote time being reduced to 48 hours.

Ford CEO Jim Farley relies on "Gemba," a Japanese principle of "go and see with your own eyes." For a major EV strategy shift, he personally inspected a torn-down competitor's car, counting fasteners and examining the wiring loom to understand the manufacturing gap firsthand before making a decision.