GM Is The Mascot For What Ails Most Organizations

Supriya Desai

Silos, territorialism, insular management...

All of these terms reflect a fundamental truth of running a company: in order for a company to perform nicely, its people must play nicely (and often) together, and the dynamics of power and performance in organizations make playing nicely together very messy indeed.

Those of you reading this who have worked in business or led teams for any length of time know the growing imperative that organizations must learn how to battle the tendency for groups of people in a competitive setting to focus inward and eschew crossing even their own boundaries. Why is it a growing imperative? Because...With everyone a journalist and the internet an increasingly ubiquitous platform, corporate missteps become news whether the violating company values transparency or not. Global operations require cross-boundary and cross-functional work on a daily basis just to meet basic customer demands, let alone to innovate. The engines of growth in the 21st century - creativity and innovation - rest on the willingness and ability of employees and managers to relentlessly learn from, share with and create with one another. 

What got me thinking about this?
I recently read TIME magazine's commentary piece by Rana Foroohar, entitled, "We've All Got GM Problems," in which Ms. Foroohar makes a case for how insular management - of the kind shown to be the case at General Motors (GM) - is a wide-spread and long-standing problem (I agree). She also cites Harvard Professor Ranjay Gulati's recommendations for "busting silos." 

Why did the article get me thinking? Well, with all due respect to Harvard Business School, I really wondered...are having core values or a mission that everyone understands (like the one IBM had under Sam Palmisano), one of Mr. Gulati's recommendations, really going to dispel with the myopic, territorial attitude that many managers and leaders have adopted? Is hiring outsiders, another silo-busting recommendation, going to change a culture if people already inside the organization cannot or, worse yet, aren't willing to? Perhaps adopting a customer mindset and perspective, also recommended in the TIME article, may help to shift the nature of company conversations away from rarely-helpful internally focused. In fact, of the ideas recommended, this last one was the most plausible. 

But I think these ideas, while useful for sure, miss the mark.
Based on my many years as both a corporate manager and leader as well as a management consultant, I believe breaking the silo tendency/eschewing territorialism/airing out management begins and ends with developing and maintaining a culture of collaboration, ownership and courage. Starting with the CEO.

This is why I am optimistic about GM's prospects. Mary Barra, GM CEO, has demonstrated (at least publicly) a willingness to work with others to investigate, understand and address the safety problems that led to so much tragedy. She has taken ownership of the problem - if anyone doubts this CEO has safety in engineering at the top of her priority list, you just need to Google GM and read what she's said and done. And let me tell you, if I've ever seen courage in action in the business world, it's a NEW chief executive - one who is under even more intense scrutiny as a female CEO - saying essentially 'yes, you're right, we screwed up, we're going to do everything we can to help those we've hurt and even more to avoid getting into this situation again.'

Both through deed and word (and compensation packages), the CEO must then align her executive team to this same set of cultural values, expecting of them what she wants to see exhibited daily throughout the organization. Leaders' actions, words and behaviors have an exponential effect - that's why they're powerful and so important to the success (or failure) of an organization - on the organization, since they influence several others who each then go on to influence several more, and so on.

Moving on from leaders, it becomes about aligning performance expectations with performance management. It's organizing and managing in a way that's fit for purpose. Meaning, if you expect collaboration, then reward collaboration. Period. Equally important (especially at the beginning of a culture change effort) is to create DISINCENTIVE to not collaborate. If you expect courage, define it well, make sure people know what it looks like (and what it doesn't) and then recognize regularly, frequently and in a meaningful way, those who demonstrate the kind of courage that makes the company more successful. And if you value something above all, make sure your key roles have this "something" as part of their job responsibilities and that your team structures are set up to allow this "something" to bubble to the top. 

Silos aren't destroyed because a company has values or a mission that is well understood. 

The solution is having a set of shared values that through consciously developed mechanisms shape a living culture that shows up every day in how people behave and think and act. For example, IBM didn't succeed because they had a shared vision of a Smarter Planet, as cited in the TIME article. They succeeded in collaborating and breaking down silos because the organization structure, performance expectations and culture were fit for purpose. And many of these aspects were influenced long before the Smarter Planet tag line came out. When I worked in IBM's Global Services back in 2005, team leaders were rewarded for collaborating with other areas of the division to bring customers more valuable solutions. There were roles specifically designed to integrate cross-functionally, and these roles were given importance. And teams that increased value to the customer by collaborating were recognized publicly and often. 

CAUTION:
One thing I saw at IBM that I must recognize is management behavior that was generally consistent with the company's values. And this was important so let me offer a cautionary note here:

If what is written on paper and espoused by leadership is not what is seen and done and heard every day by those in power, then those with less power in the organization will take their cues from what they perceive to be the more powerful source: their managers.

For example, let's say a line engineer attends a town hall meeting in which the CEO espouses the importance of speaking up, acting with courage and owning problems. This same engineer then sees an issue on the production line that could potentially slow things down considerably, and brings it to her supervisor's attention (demonstrating her courage). That supervisor, who by the way, is still measured on production speed, doesn't do anything with it (demonstrating his lack of ownership), a behavior that occurs often in that department. So now the original line engineer has her cue to 'not rock the boat.' Sorry, CEO.

So ensure the espoused and REAL cultures are the same.
Hiring outsiders, as is also suggested in the TIME article, into an organization that is resistant to collaboration or accountability or speaking up, and expecting them to remove functional silos or open up management, is a recipe for disaster (unless they're management's boss...and even then it's tricky). Outsiders who walk into cultures that are resistant, too inwardly focused or just highly dysfunctional, and who have no authority to change that culture in a meaningful way, find themselves dispirited and disillusioned. I've been there and I know many of you have, too. 

There's a reason business leaders, management consultants and academic gurus continue to talk about and focus on culture (increasingly so of late, it seems):

We'd like to think we are all independent thinkers with the courage to do what's right, even when we're beholden to a company for our living. But the truth is that we work to live, making us relatively dependent on our paychecks, which means that all of us are susceptible to demonstrating all sorts of funky behavior - like working in silos and behaving in a territorial way - when organizational dynamics aren't subject to strong, shared cultural values that live and breath in an organization fit for purpose. And if enough of us do this, it becomes the norm. 

So to bust the silos, bust the culture that supports and enables silos to exist in the first place. That's a great place to start for so many of the companies that suffer the same ills - silos, insular management, territorialism - as GM. 

Posted by

:Supriya Desai