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Employees and managers were overwhelmed and overloaded. The fundamental lemma was this: workers had ideas but no authority to act; managers had authority, but no time to evaluate and approve. Wheel’s first step was to turn Corrections, Gee’s three-decade-old management development center, into a laboratory for the creation of the new work structures and processes that would carry the company into the 21st century. In 1 988, Coronations head, Jim Bushman, dug into the problem.
What surfaced, in surveys, in feedback from class participants, in meetings with high-potential leaders of Gee’s most successful businesses-?in short, throughout the entire organization-?was off-the-charts frustration with the bevel of work. In a memorable conversation, Welch and Bushman said to each find a way to get work out of the system. And lees call the process Work-out. ” In its most basic form, Work-Out brings large groups of employees and managers from different levels and functions of the company together to address problems.
First they work in small teams to generate recommendations for incremental and breakthrough changes in organizational habits. The teams then present their ideas to a senior manager with decision-making authority at a “Town Meeting’ of the large group. The manager engages the entire group in dialogue about the ideas and makes a yes or no decision on the spot. Then assignments are immediately made to volunteers who are charged with implementing the changes. 44 Leader to Leader As we have said, when Work-Out began, the idea was to take work out of the system.
Later, as people recognized its power as a process for cultural change, it became clear that it could be used to develop leaders. To do this, GE needed to design what we call a “leadership brand”-?a set of expectations of what leaders should achieve (results) and how they should do it (behaviors). Clarity about these “brand characteristics” gives managers at all levels a picture of what it takes to succeed, provides a direction for development, and helps to make decisions about the kinds of leaders that come into and move up in the firm.
Since 1988, General Electric has held hundreds of thousands Of Work-Out Town Meetings. This process has accomplished its initial purpose, to take work out of the system. Work-Out has given the company a means of continually improving the way it gets work done. It has broken the back of the bureaucracy, brought managers and employees together, and empowered the workforce. It has changed the culture of General Electric. Work-Out, as the central process for changing Gee’s culture, has also become a training ground for leaders. Transforming an organization always requires leadership.
Tools and methods alone are not sufficient. Nor are strategies, assets, and resources. Ultimately, human beings who have leadership roles need to step up to create change-?and start a chain reaction that gets more and more people to change as well. The Work-Out dervish Brand hen Work-Out began, Gee’s leadership brand was fuzzy at best. Clearly leaders were expected to produce superior Dave Lurch is professor of business business results as measured by the standard administration at the financial numbers-?revenue, margin, net university of Misleader create the transformation and consume, expense, and so on.
They were also gang School of Busting it; leaders model new behaviors and expected to “reduce bureaucracy,” whatever nesses and author of the best-selling “H unman engage others in new behaviors; leaders that meant. How they were to achieve these Resource Champion decisions and empower others by letterer’s was less clear. Somehow, GE leaders ions,” “Results-Based inning them make decisions; leaders deliver were supposed to “liberate” their people, Leadership,” and “The results. Engage in direct dialogue-?unfiltered by HRS Scorecard. Staff-?and make decisions “on the spot. ” Sometimes this process starts at the very Not surprisingly, the model was Jack Wheel’s top of the organization with a CEO like own give-and-take style in the Corrections Jack Welch, someone who has a vision about a differ”Pit. ” But it was far from clear how this would play out .NET kind of organization and a different kind of leader the job, in the face of day-to-day routine and ownership. But sometimes the process starts at other levels, agencies. Tit unit managers who have the foresight, energy, and courage to model a new kind of leadership and prove Given this lack of clarity, its not surprising that many that it can lead to superior results. Ultimately, however, GE leaders reacted to Work-Out with a mixture of leadership change needs to both cascade down and skepticism and confusion. No matter the reaction, what bubble up-?so that effective “new” leadership exists at was clear beyond a doubt in the early days of Workable levels of the organization. Out was that the GE leadership brand was changing. Spring 2002 45 trigger, sometimes meanness. Those who are trapped in it are afraid to share, can’t be passionate, and won’t win. Speed, Simplicity, and Self-Confidence In the early months of 1 989 Welch-?with the help of “But people who are freed from the confines of their box on the organization chart, whose status rests on real-world achievement.. . Those are the people who develop the self-confidence to be simple, to share every bit of information available to them, to listen to those above, below and around them and then move boldly. E Corrections staff and the external faculty-?began to clarify and sharpen his notion of the GE leadership brand. In April of that year, at the Annual Share Owners meeting in Greenville, South Carolina, Welch talked about speed, simplicity, and self-confidence as the “keys to leading in the ‘ass. ” And with these three simple words, he began to demystify the behaviors that were central to the Work-Out way of managing. As he said in that speech, “We found in the ‘ass that speed increases in an organization as control decreases….
When we [decreased control] we began to e people who for years had spent half their time serving the system and the other half fighting it, suddenly come to life, making decisions in minutes, face to face, on matters that once would have produced months of staff gyrations and forests of paper. But this transformation, this rebirth, was largely confined to upper management. In the ‘ass we want to see it engulf and galvanism the entire company. “We found in the ‘ass that becoming faster is tied to becoming simpler. Our businesses, most with tens of thousands of employees, will not respond to visions that have sub-paragraphs and footnotes.
Translating Aspiration into Reality Steve Kerr is chief learning officer and a managing director of Goldman Cash. He was previously vice president of leadership development and chief learning officer for General Electric, with responsibility for Gee’s renowned Leadership Development Center at Corrections. “lowlife not simple we can’t be fast… And if we’re not fast we can’t win. . “But just as surely as speed flows from simplicity, simplicity is grounded in self-confidence. Self-confidence does not grow in someone who is just another appendage on the bureaucracy … Hose authority rests on little ore than a title. Bureaucracy is terrified by speed and hates simplicity. It fosters defensiveness, in- 46 Leader to Leader “But a company can’t distribute self-confidence. What it can do is give each of our people an opportunity to win, to contribute, and hence earn self- confidence themselves…. That is what our Work-out program is designed to create. ” By the middle of 1989, the leadership brand had started to take shape. Hundreds of managers were indeed leading WorkOut sessions and getting real-time coaching about how to behave effectively.
But this was a slow process of change, requiring gig levels of coaching sophistication and lots of one-on-one discussions. And the definitions of appropriate Work-Out behavior were still ad hoc, often depending on interpretation. By the end of 1 991, it was clear that behaving according to the new leadership brand was expected at GE. And hundreds of managers were coming face to face with the realities of that new brand both through their experience with Work-Out and through a variety of self-assessment and training experiences.
But the demand for shifting from the old style of GE leadership to the new style was still somewhat soft-?conveyed costly through exhortation, speeches, Corrections courses, and discussions with consultants. Thus many senior leaders still questioned the need to change: How Welch summarized the decision-making process for these shifts in the 1995 Annual Report, as follows: serious was Welch about the new leadership? Did it really make a difference in terms of pay and promotion? Could you be successful at GE without changing to the new brand? It was at Work-out sessions that it became clear that some of the rhetoric heard at the corporate level-?about involvement and excitement and turning people loose-? id not match the reality of life in the businesses. The problem was that some Of our leaders were unwilling, or unable, to abandon big-company, big-shot autocracy and embrace the values we were trying to grow. So we defined our management styles, or ‘types,’ and how they furthered or blocked our values. And then we acted. These, of course, are questions that would be raised in any organization undergoing change.
They were especially important at GE because the authenticity of the entire Work-out process in some ways depended on their answers. Thousands of employees at GE were aware that Welch was trying to change the leadership brand. Yet, for the most part, the very same senior leaders who were in place in 1 988 were still running the major businesses of GE. And many of them, despite talking a good game about Work-out and employee involvement, still operated in traditional ways-?through cocoon Shaken is a troll, intimidation, and reliance on a small managing partner of Robert H.
Schaffer & circle of staff. The real dilemma that GE faced was that the traditional, old-style leaders were achieving superior business results, regardless of their leadership behaviors. From their perspective, they were playing the same game as always-?produce the numbers-?and winning, and this gave them immunity from having to make deeper behavioral or style changes. Unless they stumbled, and nobody wanted that to happen, either, there was no cause to make a change. Associates, Stamford, Connecticut.