Question

Mary Barra started working at General Motors when she was a teenage intern in 1980. She started on the factory floor as an inspector. She held many jobs across GM, including executive assistant, head of internal communications, executive director of North American vehicle operations, VP of Global HRM, Senior VP for Global Product Development, and finally, in 2014 CEO.

When she took over as CEO at General Motors, Mary Barra surprised people when she began the process of transforming GM not by starting at the top and developing a new strategic plan per se. Rather, she focused on foundational issues designed to help transform GM’s culture. She focused on simple but important changes such as the company’s dress policy. As you learned in this chapter, organizational culture is made up of rituals, stories, and routines. It is something you can “feel” within an organization. Some scholars refer to it as a company’s “secret sauce.” Part of any new employee’s adjustment process includes learning their new organization’s culture. However, culture change is especially challenging. How people dress is an important signal to an organization’s culture.

After Barra changed the 10-page dress code to two simple words (which were “Dress Appropriately”), she had to problem-solve with leaders throughout the organization. As she asked herself, “if they cannot handle ‘dress appropriately,’ what other decision can't they handle? And I realized that often, if you have a lot of overly prescriptive policies and procedures, people will live down to them.” Thus, her focus on simplifying the dress code helped her see where the resistance to doing things in a new way might come from and how to overcome such concerns when it came to bigger decisions such as which parts of the business to retain or sell off.

Her philosophy is that everyone is better off if they stop making assumptions about what other people want or need. She also asked GM employees to try new things. For example, to encourage teams at GM to work together, she asked 250 engineers and designers to participate in a paper sailboat race. As John Calabrese, GM’s VP of Global Engineering puts it, “She wanted them to have fun at a highly stressful time, but also encourage teamwork and collaboration.” She made other changes in the culture as evidenced by the phrases heard at GM. The idea of “customer first” is not unique for a company such as Amazon but for GM, it was something new. She has also put data from customers at the center of product development as well as manufacturing decisions.

Barra states, “You can’t fake culture. You’ve got to have an environment where people feel engaged, where they’re working on things that are important and they have an opportunity to have career development… I want to create the right environment and that’s what we’re working on.” While Barra’s approach is different from past CEOs, the approach appears to be paying off. GM’s stock price was under $28 per share as a low in 2014. In 2018, it was trading at over $44 a share.

1)How do you think simplifying the dress code can contribute to the process of culture change?

2) Is having a very simple, two-word dress code empowering or ambiguous, or both? What do you see as the reasons for your response?

3)Thinking about different industries, which do you think are most suited for this type of policy? Which might be most suited? Please explain your rationale for each.

4) What do you think Mary Barra means when she says ‘You can’t fake culture”?

5)Do you think Mary Barra is well-positioned to change the company culture, given her long tenure at GM? Why or why not?

Please help. Thanks

Answer 1

1. Simplifying the dress code can directly impact the process of culture change. The whole idea is to focus on productivity or other more important issues than focusing a lot on dresses.

Thus, simplifying the dress code is an indication that the organization wants simplicity rather than complexity. The same principle would be applied for other domains too.

2. It can be ambiguous at first as people will think what appropriately exactly means. But in the long run, it is really empowering as it gives the employees the power to decide which dress is appropriate and which is not.

3. This type of policy is actually good for every big industry. The bigger the industry, the more complex are the rules. Apart from Auto industry, IT industry should also follow this policy to simplify the rules.

4. When she said that you can't fake culture, the meaning was pretty straight forward. She wanted to make her employees more engaging and emotionally connect to whatever task they have been assigned.

This can only be done by making them feel important. Whenever an employee feels that whatever he has been assigned is worth a lot value, he will always give his 100℅ . In such situation there would be no requirement of things like deadline or peer pressure.

5. Yes, Mary Barra is well positioned to change the culture of the company.

When you spend 34 years of your life in a particular company you are supposed to know the pros and cons very well.

Barra must have seen the problems with complexity in rules and this would have made her to take tough decisions to simplify the rules.