Carlie Irsay-Gordon Goes to the Gemba (Well, the Sideline)

Most NFL owners watch games from a luxury suite. Carlie Irsay-Gordon, the principal owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts, watches from the sideline near the bench, with a headset on and a notebook in her hand.

She's been doing this for years, going back to when her father, Jim Irsay, owned the team. But after she took over in 2025, following his death at age 65, the sideline routine has drawn a lot more attention. TV cameras caught her during the Colts' game against Washington in London, walking up to a coach to ask about something in her notes. That led to a lot of commentary, some of it pretty harsh.

My reaction was different. What she's doing looks a lot like what we'd call “going to the gemba” in Lean. She's going to where the work happens so she can learn, observe, and ask questions. I'd call it “Like Lean,” even if nobody in Indianapolis would use that phrase.

Why Carlie Irsay-Gordon is on the sideline

Irsay-Gordon has been unusually candid about how much she doesn't know. In a Front Office Sports interview in London, she described her football knowledge this way, as reported by CBS Sports:

“…on a good day I have like a fifth-grade reading level understanding of the game.”

That's not something you hear from many owners. Or many CEOs, for that matter.

I think it's great when a leader admits what they don't know. It models a better behavior than pretending to know it all. When the person at the top says “I need to learn more about this,” it gets a little easier for everyone else to say the same thing. And it's a lot easier to ask “I don't understand, can you explain?” or “I'm not sure that will work” when you've seen the boss do it first. Leaders who pretend to have all the answers tend to end up surrounded by people who've learned to stop telling them things.

She's also explained the purpose in terms of leadership. In that same interview, cited by The Athletic, she said she's there to understand and to ask questions:

“…being a good leader is about listening.”

According to The Athletic, she's at almost every practice and walk-through, she has traveled with scouts, and she keeps hours that look more like a coach's than an owner's. General manager Chris Ballard told The Athletic's Jourdan Rodrigue last year that he wasn't sure he'd ever been around someone more process-driven.

Plenty of owners review the results on Monday. She's trying to understand how the work actually gets done.

She's also honest about evaluating people

Here's where it gets more interesting. Irsay-Gordon hasn't pretended this is purely about learning. In a 2025 interview, quoted in a Sport & State piece by Karen Crouse that ran in the Daily Wire, she said:

“I need to be able to say, ‘Is this person full of B.S.?'”

She's paying coaches and a general manager millions of dollars, and deciding whether to keep them is her job. She told reporters, as 107.5 The Fan reported in 2025, that the headset has a practical payoff:

“It helps you make a less expensive mistake, potentially.”

I appreciate that framing. She's not claiming she'll never make a bad hire. She's trying to make better-informed decisions so the mistakes are smaller and caught earlier. That's a pretty Lean way to think about decisions under uncertainty.

What makes it gemba and not micromanagement

In Lean, there's a phrase often attributed to former Toyota president Fujio Cho:

“Go see, ask why, show respect.”

The gemba walk goes wrong when leaders show up to judge, to catch people, or to take over. It works when leaders show up to understand the process and the problems people are dealing with.

From the reporting, Irsay-Gordon seems to know where the line is. She told Rodrigue that on game days she either wears only an earpiece or doesn't speak into the headset microphone. According to 107.5 The Fan, special teams coordinator Brian Mason said she wasn't micromanaging and that ownership decisions don't get made through the headset. Head coach Shane Steichen told reporters it was “not an issue at all,” per the Sport & State piece.

She's on the sideline. She's not on the field, and she's not calling plays. That's the difference. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who sits in his special owner's suite every game, is notorious for making himself the team's general manager, meaning he makes decisions about draft choices and personnel. He's a rare exception in that regard and the Cowboys haven't reached a Super Bowl since the 1990s.

Back to Irsay-Gordon's approach, I've seen the opposite in hospitals. An executive shows up on a unit, sees something they don't like, and starts redirecting a nurse in the middle of a shift. Everybody remembers that visit, and not in a good way. Next time, people tidy up and hide problems when they see a suit coming. Irsay-Gordon asking a coach about her notes, and listening to the answer, is a very different behavior.

The critics

Not everyone sees it that way. On his podcast, Bill Simmons called the note-taking “nuts” and “bonkers,” and said he couldn't believe people in her life hadn't talked her out of it, according to The Spun via Yahoo Sports. He also asked:

“Why are we making excuses for how weird this is?”

It is unusual. I'll give him that. But unusual and wrong are different things. In most organizations, it's also unusual for the CEO to spend time where the work happens. That's a big part of why so many executives are surprised by problems their front-line staff could have told them about months earlier.

There's a more serious version of the criticism, and I think it deserves a fair hearing. In The Athletic piece, Ohio State management professor Tanya Menon described “evaluation apprehension” – the research showing people often perform worse when they feel observed, even if the boss says she's only there to learn. Menon's point is that the leader's intent isn't the same as what the employee experiences.

That's a real risk at any gemba. I've seen it in hospitals where a once-a-year executive rounding visit, with an entourage, puts everyone on edge.

But I don't think the answer is for leaders to stay in the suite. University of Michigan professor Amy Young told The Athletic that leaders should be transparent about why they're there, because otherwise people will invent their own explanation. That's something I've advised leaders to do in hospitals. I'd add that frequency matters. A leader who shows up every day becomes part of the environment. A leader who shows up once is an inspection.

Harvard's Amy Edmondson, whose work on psychological safety many of us rely on, had a different read than Menon. She told The Athletic she saw respect in the note-taking – it signals that what's happening matters enough to write down. Edmondson also wondered whether some of the reaction reflects the double standard women in leadership face when they visibly demonstrate competence.

Where's your sideline?

The Colts' record will shape how people judge her approach. If the team struggles, critics will say the owner was a distraction. If it wins, people will call her a visionary. That's outcome bias, and it doesn't tell us much about whether her method is sound. But outcome bias is prevalent in sports commentary — and the business world.

What I'd look at instead is the behavior. She admits what she doesn't know. She goes to where the work happens. She takes notes, asks questions, and mostly stays out of the way. And she's open about the fact that she's also trying to judge whether the people she hired know what they're doing.

Most executives I've worked with would never be criticized for standing on the sideline. They're more likely to have never left the suite.