Leadership Style at General Electric : The General Electric Company, or GE (NYSE: GE), is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in New York.[3] The Company operates through five segments: Energy Infrastructure, Technology Infrastructure, Capital Finance and Consumer & Industrial.[4] In 2010, Forbes ranked GE as the world's second largest company after JPMorgan Chase,[5] based on a formula that compared the total sales, profits, assets, and market value of several multinational companies.[6] The company has 287,000 employees around the world.[2]
When GE's CEO Jeff Immelt teaches up-and-coming leaders at the company's famed management-development center, he runs through a checklist of what he calls "Things Leaders Do." In an interview with FAST COMPANY, Immelt reveals his own leadership checklist.
1. Personal Responsibility.
"Enron and 9/11 marked the end of an era of individual freedom and the beginning of personal responsibility. You lead today by building teams and placing others first. It's not about you."
2. Simplify Constantly.
"I always use Jack [Welch] as my example here. Every leader needs to clearly explain the top three things the organization is working on. If you can't, then you're not leading well."
3. Understand Breadth, Depth, and Context.
"The most important thing I've learned since becoming CEO is context. It's how your company fits in with the world and how you respond to it."
4. The importance of alignment and time management.
"There is no real magic to being a good leader. But at the end of every week, you have to spend your time around the things that are really important: setting priorities, measuring outcomes, and rewarding them."
5. Leaders learn constantly and also have to learn how to teach.
"A leader's primary role is to teach. People who work with you don't have to agree with you, but they have to feel you're willing to share what you've learned."
6. Stay true to your own style.
"Leadership is an intense journey into yourself. You can use your own style to get anything done. It's about being self-aware. Every morning, I look in the mirror and say, 'I could have done three things better yesterday.' "
7. Manage by setting boundaries with freedom in the middle.
"The boundaries are commitment, passion, trust, and teamwork. Within those guidelines, there's plenty of freedom. But no one can cross those four boundaries."
8. Stay disciplined and detailed.
"Good leaders are never afraid to intervene personally on things that are important. Michael Dell can tell you how many computers were shipped from Singapore yesterday."
9. Leave a few things unsaid.
"I may know an answer, but I'll often let the team find its own way. Sometimes, being an active listener is much more effective than ending a meeting with me enumerating 17 actions."
10. Like people.
"Today, it's employment at will. Nobody's here who doesn't want to be here. So it's critical to understand people, to always be fair, and to want the best in them. And when it doesn't work, they need to know it's not personal."
When a CEO has earned the trust and support of his team, he has more leeway to go against majority opinion on big strategy calls. That's what General Electric (GE) Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt banked on in late 2004 when he went forward with his "ecomagination" proposal despite the skepticism evinced by most of his senior executives and advisers, according to Noel Tichy, a former head of GE's Leadership Center.

"Jeff has been very careful to build a trustworthy, aligned team around him," says Tichy, who is now a professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at the University of Michigan Business School and the author of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls (Portfolio, 2007).

CULTIVATING A BASE
Immelt began to form his base of support at GE as early as 1981, when he joined the company. As he climbed through the ranks, he began to impress his leadership style on key players. In 2001, Immelt was tapped by then-CEO Jack Welch as his successor, and Welch helped to ease out his fellow top contenders, and . "All too often the politics of succession carries over into the new administration," points out Tichy. "Welch made it clear to all three finalists that as soon as the winner was selected, [the] other two needed to leave GE so as to politically free up the new CEO."

In 2004, Immelt was three years into his tenure as chairman and CEO and his support among top executives within the company was stronger than ever. That would be vital in each of what Tichy defines as the three phases of the judgment process ahead: preparation, alignment of stakeholders, and execution.

After hitting on the idea of a companywide environmental initiative, Immelt set about delegating preliminary steps to various teams within the company: researching greenhouse legislation, conducting customer surveys, prototyping new products, formulating metrics, drafting cross-company guidelines. And when GE's resources weren't sufficient, Immelt didn't hesitate to bring in an outside consultant, GreenOrder.

PERSUADING A RELUCTANT TEAM
By December, Immelt was prepared for the next decisive, and difficult, step: aligning key stakeholders. Immelt met with his top management team to outline his environmental initiative, which was received negatively by a majority of the senior managers. Among the criticisms leveled: that it was costly, hypocritical, and uncharacteristic of GE.

Immelt acknowledged the legitimacy of the concerns raised. But instead of backing down, he drew on the trust he had earned from his team and made a call to go forward with the initiative, which became known as "ecomagination." "He wouldn't have been able to do it if he didn't already have the aligned people at the top of the organization," says Tichy.

What were Immelt's other options in the face of such strong opposition? "Some weak leaders would back off and tell [the team] he would not go forward," acknowledges Tichy. Alternatively, he says Immelt could have put the initiative on the back burner, hoping to win support and allow the controversy to die down. Or he could have proceeded even more confidently than he did—without acknowledging the criticism raised by his team. Any of these tactics, says the management guru, "would have been an abdication of his role as the leader charged with making the ultimate judgment calls for GE."

FOLLOWING THROUGH
A CEO can make such overrides from time to time, but Tichy warns that they have a limit: "If he or she keeps making calls against the majority, even though you're the CEO of the company you begin to undermine the people, alignment, and support."

When is the right time to pull rank? That depends. According to Tichy, Immelt is known to solicit input from those around him before making a decision. But he's also earned a reputation for trusting his instincts, as best articulated by the catchphrase used to describe him in Leadership: "Boom, then I make the decision."

The final step of Immelt's judgment was execution. "Jeff understands that his job in the judgment process is not only to make the call, but to make certain in the execution phase that the [appropriate] adjustments are made, the learning happens, and that there's a payoff," says Tichy.

Since GE is a company of many unique businesses, most adjustments rely on cooperation among the heads of each business unit. This was one of the toughest parts of the execution process, according to GE spokesperson Peter O'Toole: "Ecomagination had to enable our business leaders to work better with their customers," O'Toole says. "It couldn't be an 'unfunded mandate' from corporate. So there had to be give-and-take with our top leaders to ensure we were helping our customers."
 
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