What I learned from my career at GE

It's hard to believe that it's been ~5 months since I signed off of Outlook as "Brooks, Matt (GE Corporate)" (with the coolest email address: [email protected]) for the last time. My family, starting with my great-grandfather, had worked for GE for 4 generations, > 400 man-years of service both on my mom and dad's sides, before I left. My first internship started in May 1999, and other than some smaller, part-time roles before then, it was the only company and culture that I had known. Being on the outside, I've had time to reflect and look back at several things that GE taught me about simplification, collaboration, trust, and empowerment. In a short homage to this iconic American manufacturing and innovation company, I share some key lessons learned and what I believe GE was doing right in these areas. (Please note that this is in no way an article about Bank of America and what they are or aren't doing in these areas.)

Simplification isn't just a buzzword: it's a cultural choice: GE has made many attempts to get simpler since I joined it. The whole Six Sigma era, spearheaded by Jack Welch, was preceded by the "Process Improvement Guru" era and continued by Jeff Immelt with the "simplification" era. Six Sigma, although arguably rolled out in a complicated way, was meant to simplify product development while improving quality (and reducing costs generated by defects). Later, in Mr. Immelt's days, the simplification movement may have gone a little too far by removing necessary operational controls, nevertheless, structures like "fast works", inspired by "The Lean Startup" (Eric Ries), drove the message that people need to be able to be creative, chop out unnecessary bureaucracy, and focus on solving customer problems. This mindset sticks with me today...I look at problems and processes from a different perspective. I'm also always ready to challenge the status quo, if for no other reason than to encourage others to think creatively and err on the side of action.

Collaboration is the way to build technology that will help the world grow: Adopting new development techniques such as Agile (pick your framework) are great...but many companies have been rebuilding their physical spaces to transform them into open-collaboration spaces while not actually changing the way employees work. Creating open space and then bringing employees who work on the phone 80+% of the time into them to work is not collaboration. Three places at GE where I saw this transformation really be effective were the GE Tech Center in New Orleans, LA; the GE Aviation Software Development floor in the GE Tech Center in Detroit, MI; and the GE Aviation IT Center in Evendale, OH. In each of these locations, not only did GE transform the work spaces, but they brought people together who were actually collaborating every day to develop quality software. These folks, often working in co-located scrum teams, were able to use different spaces to come together; collaborate on writing, testing, and reviewing code; and break out to brainstorm solutions to business problems with the business teams. Open spaces can be powerfully effective or powerfully detrimental to your work culture and employee's effectiveness. My advice: think of the problem of increasing collaboration holistically.

Trusting employees means doing things that show that you trust them: GE, in its later years, did a world-class job of trying to build trust with employees. The former company-wide CIO, Jim Fowler, dedicated a sizable amount of resources to spearhead initiatives across the company to remove unnecessary approvals; remove unnecessary work-flows; empower employees to make decisions (within guardrails, which were typically automated); and only surface issues or suspicious activity to people leaders (GE's re-branded, and re-thought-out role for managers). He supported robotic process automation and machine learning projects in order to remove the burden of unnecessary controllership activities from employees while keeping the company safe. As a people leader, I was able to spend time collaborating with my employees and focusing on business priorities instead of doing the paperwork-intensive job of a manager in many other companies. I felt empowered to make decisions and knew when I had to escalate to my boss or another authority if a special request came through. I also worked with very smart and creative leaders such as Susan Beauregard and Jamey Mock (to name only a couple) that continued to push the envelope on trusting their teams to make big decisions while holding leaders accountable. These folks taught me how to balance what we need to do with what we want to do in order to make logical decisions that ultimately pushed the ball forward and accelerated technology's ability to enable the business. Employees can't grow your company if they're spending countless hours filling out paperwork...however, companies shouldn't "throw the baby out with the bath water," either...documentation of critical processes and changes is a best practice.

Leading people is way more powerful than managing them: GE, for a very long time, was seen as an out-front leader in HR practices. I was extremely lucky to work hand-in-hand with some of the greats such as Susan Peters, Deb Elam, Janice Semper, Marc Chini, Julie Grzeda, Jennifer Cherry, and Jayzen Patria. These folks pioneered areas of empowerment, trust, inclusion/diversity, leadership development, education, and attraction of top university talent around the world. I led the (now named) Digital Technology Leadership Program, the LGBTQ employee resource group, and built/ran the service-delivery and technology arms of the People Analytics team for ~5 years. It was an honor and constant source of inspiration to work with people who were truly pushing the boundaries of employee inspiration. Partnering with GE Crotonville, we were developing ways to inspire people leaders so that they could in-turn feel empowered, and knowledgeable, about how to inspire their people. With >60,000 managers at the time and >300,000 global employees, it was critical to build a culture of creativity and empathy within people leaders to recognize, reward, and motivate talent within the company. Likewise, leaders needed to know how to spot areas where improvement was necessary and remove the fear of the bottom 10% being fired, which came out of the Jack Welch era. GE leaders were excellent for doing these things; the amount of GE alumni in critical roles at other companies, or who have gone on to start their own companies, is a testament to their legacy.

I could go on, and am certainly happy to talk about the above, or more, lessons learned in private conversations, but as I officially close my book on "My Life at GE" and move forward into a very exciting, challenging, and so-far fulfilling story at Bank of America, I wanted to share at least the highlights with you all. Considering the tug-of-war for excellent talent going on today, I truly believe that companies must continue pushing their boundaries to be the most successful in their markets.

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Matt Brooks is a seasoned thought leader and practitioner in data and analytics; culture; product development; and transformation. View additional articles by clicking below; like them/follow him to learn more!