Tuesday, November 26, 2013

HR SPECIAL.......................... Leader Factory


 Leader Factory 

GE's global human resources chief Susan Peters on running the world's most vaunted leadership development machine 

If there's a constant thread running through the 34 years that Susan Peters has spent at GE, it's been the company's ability to churn out world class business leaders. A few months ago, GE Chairman Jeff Immelt announced Peters - - who has served across businesses ranging from plastics to appliances to NBC -- as the $ 147 billion conglomerate's human resource chief. In India recently, Peters chatted with CD on GE's leadership template, its new leadership experiments, and the infamous S curve. Edited excerpts:
GE says that developing management talent is its core competence?
That sounds a little arrogant, right? If you think of what it takes to design, make, sell and service products, it is all about people. So, we can say we are a technology company, which we are, but you do not have technology without great people. You do not have the ability to take a product and evolve it to the market needs of India, Africa, Vietnam. The idea of leadership development is about taking the people that you have and making them better so that we make better outcomes for customers. How has the GE leadership template changed in the last few years?
The challenge in leadership development is to understand which attributes of leadership are foundational and which you have to change and improve. Fundamental things might be things like your development theory of the case. No matter what is going on in the market, your theory of the case should be the same. And ours is that we believe in meritocracy as our cultural base and then we believe everyone can and should be a leader in the context of leadership being about personal development.
What do you look for in leaders in the New Normal?
Well, we actually did quite a bit of research post the financial crisis. One thing we know about the new normal is that everything is going to be evolving. We have always expected people to be clear thinkers, now we expect them to do it in the context of a volatile world. I have to measure people on their agility. Now we can even articulate clearly what it looks like to show agility. An example we use quite frequently is external focus, which is one of our growth values. A decade ago it was used to refer to customer focus, but in this era it is a much broader set of stakeholders -- government, community, NGOs, regulators.
A lot of GE leaders are hired as CEOs. What are the tenets of leadership that are inherent in a GE leader?
First, there is a very high expectation around a result orientation and execution. The executive search community knows that and when your client wants somebody who knows how to get things done, make things happen, they often look to the GE leadership chain. Our leaders are strategic and thoughtful and visionary coupled with an ability to make things happen, because in the end it is all about outcomes for customers. Some of the things that happen by osmosis within the company, people just absorb it. Coaching and development of teams, we obviously measure that and improve it constantly. When you have been the product of that system and you see your colleague doing it, you pick it up and you do it. GE leaders tend to be very ambidextrous. They can think long term and short term, they can do strategy and tactics, they can think about getting things done but also think about the big picture and that is a very unique combination.
What is the unique differentiator for GE in terms of people development?
The commitment of our leaders to these things. Leaders create leaders, HR does not create leaders. Every year, through the Welch era, the Immelt era, and prior to that even, we go through session C (a tough performance appraisal and leadership assessment process). We talk about people, what we can do to help that them develop and improve. The processes that we provide are very robust, but the time and commitment and the high belief in this system is a leadership game and they own it. Leaders are expected to train other people, so if you go for training, most of the trainers are our leaders.
I was reading an article you wrote in HBR, where you talked about a more collegial and personal view of leadership rising through the workforce. What's that?
The way work is done is evolving. For a long time work was done in a very vertical way. The leader at the top had more information than the person below them and that person knew more than the person below them and it is sort of an approach where information was only shared in smaller bites sizes as you went down. In today's world information is much more ubiquitous. Everybody has access to what is going on internally and externally. From a vertical structure, it has become a horizontal structure. You have a horizontal way of getting things done and therefore how does work get done best, through collegial connected teams, whether they are physically together or not. In GE and in many other companies they are scattered around the world, they are virtual. The way work gets done is exciting, it is very retentive, people love seeing the outcome of their work and remembering that they made that happen.
What was this global new directions experiment?
We had a few millenials on various training programs. We literally took them out of their job and brought them to Crotonville. We taught them teaming skills and the people who taught them were from a factory in our aviation business. We made such incredible progress in teaming, where there are no hierarchial structures and yet decisions are made. So those hourly workers taught this team how to work together with no blocks. We said, do whatever you want for three months, here is what we would like at the end.
    A group of them in the second group rented a house in California and they lived together for a week or two just working on the project. In the very first group it was about what would it take to attract and retain people like you in emerging markets. And they came back with 200 ideas and they narrowed it down to 70 ideas and then we out eight ideas and we were actually implementing them as we go.
    The way we did it was probably as important as the outcome. They had so much fun that the next year we took another group. We were thinking about building simplification in this company through speed and decision making. Taking some tools of the lean startup approach of the Silicon Valley and applying it in a big company. They helped us with that.
    Most career assignments are quite structured. So taking the structure away entirely was scary for us and scary even for the young people who professed that this is their comfort zone, but it is not. Well here is the end goal, but go figure out how to do it and there is no boss. It was an experiment and we have to do even more of this kind of an experimenting with different things in a lot of different places.
What makes GE leaders successful?
Good, intellectual business acumen, no matter what function you are in. Then you need to have performance with integrity and you have to have a history of performance. These are like tickets to the game. Once you are in the game there are thousands of people, how do you get selected to be on the team? A couple of differentiators stand out. Great leaders have great peer relationships. They know how to leverage the people around them and influence them to help get that work done. I would say they have an ability to articulate the vision of what they want people to do. So they are great communicators, they can inspire people to work. In today's world, with people being so distracted, being a great communicator is actually one of the skills of leadership that has stood the test of time.
A lot of people have tried to copy Crotonville but few have got it right. What's so special about Crotonville?
Crotonville has been in the GE system since the mid 1950s. We have been teaching there for so many years which is one of the reasons why it is not replicable. It is one of the reasons why leaders teaching leaders is so much a part of the culture of the company. But I would say that one of the reasons Crotonville is unique and special is that, we impart courses for multiple businesses from multiple geographies, from multiple functions across multiple layers. You can have the most junior people there at the same time Jeff (Immelt), is there. And everybody hits the bar at night and we run into people and talk in the hallway, so there is a sort of this magic thing you can't replicate. The second thing is we have been re-imagining for several years now the Crotonville experience, what we teach, how we teach, where we teach it and it really has been built to reflect the new leadership charachteristics.
    One of the things we learnt in our research as we were going through what it takes to lead in today's world is that today's leader will have to be much more reflective. Now that is not a phrase that you would naturally think of with big business and GE. Reflection sounds a little soft. But the truth is that today's world is so fast and there is so much information that people are not getting enough time to think. So we have forced more reflection into Crotonville classes.
We role model, we make people do things that are uncomfortable personally and in groups. We know that development comes out of being outside your comfort zone, so we try all kinds of things. We not only do training there in these multiple industry, multiple region and country groups, we take our leaders to different parts of the world. One of our key classes is the classical BMC, the Business Management Class. We do three sessions a year. They were in Thailand, Vietnam, Saudi, Qatar. We sent our team to Africa. So some of this is just putting people to places that are different and we know most adults learn by experience. We have changed the classrooms so that it is a more physically moving. We busted through the walls and put windows. We want the environment to reflect the realities of the world and it's more about transparency and openness. So you have to have a very integrated approach to thinking about this. You start by knowing that you are never done. So, you never end - you say okay, this program is done, because that program has to change and evolve all the time. So people who have been in MDC class of November 2013 and you go in March 2014, there are going to be differences.
GE has always been a company who has pushed the insider leader. In a world which is changing so fast and it is all about diversity of thought, are you still sticking to that inside leader or more open to that than earlier times?
In the last five years, we have had many more external leaders come into the company. Banmali Agrawala, our India CEO, is a great example. We had an expat here, John Flannery, and we knew that someday he would leave and bringing Banmali in and working with them together for a while was smart for everybody. While we still have incredible growth opportunity for GE talent, we also have many more people coming from outside.
The GE S-curve practice has been followed by many companies. But firing last 10% can be a dangerous practice if not done right as often muscle gets cut with the fat without distinction. What do other companies don't get?
I have been with the company a really, really long time and through that whole time there has been some system that has differentiated people. On average, for the last 20 years the involuntary attrition level has been around 7%. So you know, 10% is a nice round number but that's not the truth, the real question that we should be asking is how do you get there. What we want is to find the best people, put them in the top, recognize, reward them, grow them, ensure that the people who are really carrying the company are getting the right feedback and support and training and development. Those who are not moving apace too get feedback in development as their first course of action, but if they cannot make it then we help them leave with respect and dignity. We will always believe in differentiation. We are more about guidelines than specific numbers. We want to make sure that people do not do anything silly just to meet the number. I have to put 10% in this box and I do not really believe this and we do not want that, we want people to use judgment in the process. There might be teams in GE who have no people that are on that list, there are others who have 15%. You have to calibrate, you have to talk about it and you have to be fair and give people time.
    vinod
.mahanta CDET131115






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