Until I get tired of hearing or reading, “If you have a problem, don’t hesitate to come to me. My door is always open.” In more than 30 years of my professional work, somehow I have not observed queues at the doors of directors or managers. Another type of leadership emphasizes the supervisor’s presence in the workplace of his subordinates. And that’s for most of the supervisor’s working time. In the Lean environment, this is called gemba presence.

In this upcoming third episode of my podcast, “How to be a True Leader,” I propose to contrast the two practices. For such a confrontation, I chose two figures from history. One character is a legendary military leader. The second character is a legendary business leader. Interestingly, none of them had an open-door policy. Both were always on the front line.

I invite you to listen to this episode. In addition, I will explain in this episode why any true leader must meet the 3G criteria. And by no means is this about the cell phone system.