GMC Mary Barra leadership

MAN 4046

Juliette Kerzerho

Team #5, Section #1

CEO Mary T.Barra, General Motors Company

Team Members

Eric Da Silva

Christine Marsh

Alexander Waskiewicz

October 2018

THE COMPANY AND CEO

The Company

General Motors is an internationally renowned company, which has become a leader in the automotive market. A company founded in 1908, it sells and builds its vehicles through several brands such as Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, GMC, Hummer, Opel, and Pontiac. The US giant has established itself thanks to its 180,000 employees, its presence on five continents, and its ability to adapt with more than 70 languages spoken (General Motors, n.d).

Innovation is a key and essential term for defining this automotive leader, particularly with the creation of at least twenty fully electric vehicles by 2023 and the autonomous driving of its vehicles, including the Chevrolet Bolt EV (General Motors, n.d). How could a company more than a century old  become number one on the car construction market? Values, know-how, leadership and employees are the answers to this question.

“To earn customers for life by building brands that inspire passion and loyalty through not only breakthrough technologies but also by serving and improving the communities in which we live and work around the world.” (Panmore Institute, 2017)

Chief Executive Officer

 According to the FORTUNE ranking published in 2018, General Motors was ranked the 10th best company with $157.311 billion in revenue (Fortune, 2018). This rise in rank is due to a perfect combination of successful leadership, and Mary Barra, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) within the organization.

 Since her childhood, the CEO has always been involved in the automotive environment thanks to her father who himself worked in the company, but also through her cousin who had a Red Camaro she dreamed of owning a day. Mary Barra is ranked 8th on the CEO of the Top 1000 Companies (public and private) (Chief Executive, 2017), and is also the first woman to run a company in the auto sector in Detroit called "Big Three" (Mary T. Barra, 2017). In an environment usually known to be male, Mary Barra was able to win, and it is thanks to a much more collaborative approach, less practiced by men.

 Her strength comes also from the fact that she has a great knowledge of the company thanks to the many positions that she had, such as: assistant director of communication, director of product development, director of human resources, and many others. In 1980, at age 18, she got her first job at Pontiac as General Motors Institute Co-op Student (Mary T. Barra, 2017). Her former manager Lee Lacocca notes that Mary Barra is a great fit for the company because of the various tasks she has done showing listening and thinking skills, so General Motors is fellowshipping her MBA at Stanford.

        The way Mary Barra manages the American giant is not only due to her technical skills and human skills but also to the ability to see her business in a general way. This is explained by the gain in experience associated with the plurality of positions held at General Motors. In pursuit of innovation, the CEO focuses on three technological revolutions: propulsion, connectivity, and autonomy (Fortune, 2016). Since the increase in oil prices in 2006-2007 (Fortune, 2016) and the economic crisis of 2008, Mary Barra has been ahead of her competitors by offering products following these three revolutions because she knows that “tomorrow ", decisions will no longer be guided by the companies themselves but rather by economic, political and environmental issues. In addition, in less than a year, she increased the sales percentage for the Chevrolet model, which had never been done before (Industry Week, 2014). The company also faced numerous economic crises with the bankruptcy of Chrysler (Stanford Magazine, 2011) and the dismissal of several employees. Her conceptual skills allowed her to restore stability to General Motors, which was her first goal, but she also managed to boost sales from $4.7 billion in 2010 to $9.7 billion in 2016 (Fortune, 2016).

 The CEO follows an openness leadership style making her a charismatic personality and role model for General Motors. Unlike her predecessor Dan Akerson, Mary Barra takes a much more collaborative approach. She creates an inclusive environment (Industry Week, 2014) that allows her to listen to her employees and makes her especially accessible to them. Mary Barra used the crisis (see below, mechanics issues) as a springboard, because it allowed her to find an even more revolutionary approach for General Motors in terms of innovation, but also to strengthen her team because she connected two functions that had never worked together and had never been done before: the purchasing development team and the product development team. She also follows a consensus approach, that is to say, she organizes halls meetings with all of her teams where they all participate and can give their opinion. She thinks that the more people there are, the more points of view, and the greater the wealth and the future of the company will be. She is an incentive with her collaborators because she likes to question their opinions according to their values and ethics.

        The CEO is a charismatic personality because of the many difficult choices she has to make in her career. Her success is particularly thanks to her choices that allowed her to become a model and an excellent leader, because she made decisions that others would never have dared to. According to her, this can be explained as follows: “ask for feedback, meet to discuss and not to disseminate information, simplify your message, remember to affect change, know your business, know your business, win both hearts and minds, align on values and lead cultures with behaviors” (Wharton, 2018).

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