Keynote Discussion: Mary Barra with Adam Grant | 2018 Wharton People Analytics Conference

Mary, welcome. We're so glad to have you here. It's great to be here. So I want to start by asking about your career journey. You began at General Motors as an 18-year-old intern. You ran HR. Now you're the CEO of a Fortune 7 company. How in the world did that happen? That's a good question. General Motors has been a great place. I've been there for almost 38 years. And I've worked in so many different areas. When I started at 18, I was a co-op student going to General Motors Institute, which is now Kettering University, and got to rotate through a lot of different areas, which helped me pick the areas I've been interested in. But one of the things you have as a benefit when you work for a large company, there's so many different things you can do. So as an engineer, early in my career, I worked in a plant. And I worked in engineering, continued to move through the organization, had the opportunity to be the executive assistant to the chairman and the vice chair, which was a lot of special projects. But it kind of showed me the whole corporation, as opposed to the operations piece, which led to communications, then back to I was actually a plant manager, then to HR, and then to product development. So I've been fortunate that I've been given a lot of opportunities. But I think early on, a lot of those opportunities were from my interest in people. And I worked for a leader who said, you have to win their hearts and minds. And really focusing on engaging people and making sure you do win their hearts and minds, and they know how they're contributing, and then how do you empower them, I think has been key to a lot of the different moves I've had. I obviously love that message. But I have to say, I don't meet a lot of engineers who get that. So what was it that opened your eyes to the importance of people for driving work in organizations? Well, the person who shared that with me was actually running our manufacturing operations. And so when you think about people who are working on an assembly line, and we're counting on them to do something potentially 60 times an hour with high quality, how do you motivate them? How do you make sure every single one, 60 times eight hours, is done perfectly? And helping them understand and make that connection to the customer, make that connection to quality, make that connection to how it supports the vision of the company, that really resonated with me. Actually, my very, very first job as a co-op student, I was on the line. And so I kind of went, oh, I think that makes sense, that I want that person to feel that motivation and feel valued and empowered. So we have a lot of HR and talent leaders here in the audience. And I think that it's fair to say that sometimes this field doesn't get the respect that it deserves or that we might want. And so I'm curious about, as a CEO of a huge company, what's your advice for HR and talent leaders to show that they're strategic, to show that they're actually influencing the bottom line, as opposed to just being the benefits police? Well, I think absolutely don't be the benefits police. But I think is recognizing, I mean, people are the most important asset in the company. And so the role that HR has of hiring, of retaining, of part of the development program, I think is so important. So my first advice to you is don't accept that notion. I would just discard it. I mean, you know what you're doing. And from a developing people and a talent acquisition, organizational development, how important that is. But the one piece of advice is know the business. I mean, when I was in HR, we were putting in a new system to do our performance management. And I made sure I literally went keystroke by keystroke at one point, because I also said every moment that an engineer or anyone in the organization is doing this training or this process, it's time they're not doing their value-added job for the corporation. And so how can we, but there's really important things we have to do. Let's make sure we do them as efficiently as possible, but then partner with the business. But I would say personally, for me, the minute I was in a leadership role, I mean, I wanted my HR person, my lawyer, and my finance person really close by. And there's times I always tell the person I work with and partner from an HR perspective, I want you to tell me if you think I'm off base. Or if you know the message I'm trying to inspire, if it's not working, I want you to tell me. And so I think the HR role is vitally important. I love that time, because you're dealing with people. And as you all probably know better than I, people sometimes do the craziest things. You see everything in HR. But you also see the goodness of people and how to really help them achieve their goals. So I think it's very rewarding. So I just wouldn't subscribe to not being valued. I mean, you're driving value every day. I have to ask you about the dress code story. How did that happen? Well, we were just coming out of the restructuring, and I was working, our CEO at the time, Fritz Henderson, a lot, I hope you never are companies that go through this, but a lot gets set aside when you're going through a restructure and a bankruptcy process. And so it was an opportunity, though, to really define the culture that we wanted. And so we brainstormed, and so we said, okay, let's do the dress code. It's dress appropriately. The funny thing was, and this is kind of the side of HR, so then I had HR arguing with me. And they said, okay, it can be dress appropriately, but here's what we're gonna put in the manual. And it was like, don't wear T-shirts that have inappropriate sayings. Like, well, is that appropriate? Why do I have to call that out? Because I think that's not appropriate. So I think dress appropriately. And it was this interesting, my first hurdle was actually with the HR team. And I finally had to say, no, it's two words. And that's all we want. And so I think making that, and it really, for me, was a window into the company. So two super quick stories. One, I had this eighth-level manager write me this kind of scathing email of, you need to put out a better dress code policy. This is not enough. And so I called him. And of course, that shook him a little bit. And I called him, I said, so help me, let's talk. Help me understand. And he said, well, I don't think it's appropriate. And I said, okay, why? And it turned out, occasionally, that department, at a very short notice, had to deal with government officials. And he was worried that if they were in jeans or something, that wouldn't be appropriate. And I said, okay, well, why don't you talk to your team? I said, what is your responsibility at the company? Established, he was important for a pretty important part of the company, multimillion-dollar budget. And he called me back two weeks later. He said, I talked to my team. I told him what I was worried about. We brainstormed. They agreed for the four people that occasionally need to meet with government officials, they'll have a pair of dress pants in their locker or whatever, and problem solved. And so to me, though, the big aha was, you really needed to make sure your managers are empowered. Because if they can't handle dress appropriately, what other judgment decisions are they not making? And I realized, sometimes you can have a lot of policies and procedures that people will live down to. Or then the manager can say, yeah, I don't agree with it either. If you make them own it, it really, especially at the first level of people supervision, it helps develop them. So it was eye-opening, but it's something that now, it did, small little things change the culture. It's not the only thing, but it contributed. So I wanna talk to you about the role of data in the job that you do now. For starters, I think the interesting thing for me is that you actually have your vision attached to data metrics. So you talk about zero crashes, zero emissions. How did you get to those targets? And how do you think about measuring against them when zero's almost impossible to hit number? I think, though, it makes it really clear where the company's headed. And when you have 180,000 people, you need to be clear and know that everybody knows the direction. So to say zero crashes, when we look at autonomous vehicles, we believe that they are a key ingredient to making travel safer. Right now in the United States alone, 40,000 people lose their lives due to traffic accidents, and 90% of them have a human error component to them. So if we can use autonomous driving, we can dramatically reduce those incidents. And I believe over time, we should aspire to zero. From an emissions perspective, if you have electric vehicles and they're through a clean source, you really can get to a zero emission vehicle. And then congestion, I believe, is a combination of autonomous and different modes of travel, not just the individual driving their vehicle, but ride sharing, car sharing. It will take different designs of cities, but I really believe we can get to a place of zero congestion. And all of this we looked at is General Motors responsibility and also with a very strong focus on the customer. Clearly, a customer's focused on safety. Clearly, most customers care about the environment, and no one likes to waste time in congestion. So a very customer-focused, aspirational goal, but we believe we have the technology and working with the right partners, we can accomplish it. You have a lot of data that I think support that vision of the future, but sometimes people who don't have access to those data have a hard time getting it. So as a fellow native Detroiter, a lot of my family still lives there, and there's at least one who refuses to believe that anything other than a human will drive a car. No matter how many times I say, actually, here's where this is going. How do you think about making a persuasive case about how the future's gonna change? Well, again, I think when you look at change, I think just human nature, people don't want change. The benefit is greater. I'm an engineer, so that one time I had an equation that the benefit was like B has to be greater than the E effort for the change. It was an equation, so I liked it. But if you think about it, is for people to change, it has to be compelling of where they're headed. So what's compelling is safety. If you can feel much safer, I mean, for anyone who's tragically lost someone in a car accident, you know that pain, and almost all of those situations can be changed. When I look at the world, and we believe in global, the science of climate change, how do we make sure this planet is not great just for our generation and my children's, grandchildren's, but it's a responsibility? And then congestion, people clearly see the value because I think a lot of road rage comes from people being frustrated because they can't get to where they wanna get to as quickly as they think they should. So I've tried to make that case. I don't think I made it as convincingly as you just did, but, and the reaction is often, but I really like driving. But I really like to drive, but I don't when it's congested or when I'm really busy, and that time where I'm, even if I'm driving, if there's no traffic, it still is time I could be doing something else. So I love to drive. In fact, just the last, the Corvette ZR1, our new one is rolling off the line right now, so I can't wait. Also, we have our new trucks on the road and I'll be driving one of those soon. So I love to drive and I love our vehicles and I just love to do that, but there's times where almost anyone is gonna say, if someone else could get me from point A to point B, that would be better for me. And then once you have the opportunity to experience, I've spent a lot of time in our self-driving vehicles and you see the technology, you see how it works. I understand the sensors and all the information we're fusing together and deeply integrating into the vehicle with a key focus on safety that gives me a lot of confidence. But at the end of the day, you've gotta provide that value. One of the interesting things you've done at General Motors is we had Michael Arena speak here a couple years ago and actually went and mapped the social networks inside the company to see who's talking to whom, who's influencing whom, and a lot of the leaders I work with are afraid to do that because they're worried that they might find out they promoted the wrong person or they've been leading ineffectively. How do you think about overcoming some of those obstacles? You know, I kind of subscribe to everything can be made better. And so if there's data to be available that, even though I may not like what it tells me, once I know it exists, I wanna have it. That's just me because how can we be better? And say I have the wrong person in a job, well, maybe there's a job they're better suited to. One of the things I always look at with people is if you don't have the right person in the job, it doesn't make them a bad person. It just is not a good fit. And like all of you, I'm sure, having to have moved people, separated people, a lot of times they're relieved. Because imagine when you're in a job and everyone around you is like, oh, this person is not doing well. They know. And how hard is that to go to work every day knowing everyone, or you don't feel you're doing your best or you don't feel like this is working out well and everyone around you. And so seeing people, whether they leave or move to a different place in the company and succeed, I find very rewarding. So it's about, if you subscribe to it, everything can be made better. Data helps us do that. So let's say I report to you and I finish an analysis that says somebody you think is really effective is not performing as well as you think. How do you want me to bring that to you? Should I just say, hey, I have some data. Do you wanna see them? Absolutely, actually, yeah. I mean, yeah, let's talk about it. Or sometimes, and this is something I use with some of my team members of, if I know it's something they're not gonna wanna hear, I'm like, I start with, you know, you're probably not gonna like this. And then they're, okay, I've got the right mindset, but let's talk about it. And here's a perspective. Now, why don't you give me your perspective? So I think it's the way you have the conversation. And also if they know you believe in them and you want them to be their best when you're having that person, or you want problems brought forward, one of the things that you and I have talked about, but I always tell, I tell the whole employee base, you know, if you can't solve a problem, the best time to raise it is as soon as you know it, because that's a small. The longer it goes, the bigger it gets. I mean, how many of you know a problem that goes away on its own? Very rare. So smaller, better. Try and solve it. And so, you know, again, I can't promise you I'm always, you know, the best and most receptive, but I might come back to you the next day and go, hey, you know what, I didn't react really well to that, but that was really important. So I'd love to get a little bit of a view into your decision-making processes and how data figure into those. So you acquired Cruise to, I think, help drive this revolution in autonomous vehicles. How did you think about whether that was a good decision, what data to rely on, when to trust your intuition? Well, as we had spent a lot of time as a company, as a leadership team, we had gone to Silicon Valley, talked to a lot of different companies in all areas of technology, coupled with what we were doing in R&D. And we had been working on a lot of the elements of autonomy but we then, we began to believe it could happen much faster. And instead of, I'll say, an evolutionary path, it could happen on a revolutionary path. And then we looked at, okay, what are the skillsets we need? And Cruise was a company, we'd actually, we have a ventures group out in Silicon Valley also, it's in Detroit, we have startups in Israel. So it's really an organization that looks globally for startups that we think might be important to the company and we invest in them. Cruise was a company we had had a relationship with early on and we'd been watching it evolve. And just at the time, we were saying, here's how we wanna go about doing autonomous, and I'll say in more of a revolutionary fashion, in a car share environment, as opposed to just keep putting more and more safety technology on a vehicle. They were coming to the same conclusion that in order for the technology to work well, it needed to be deeply integrated. And so, the key thing we talked, we made sure we were goal aligned, we made sure we had the same values, focused on the customer, and then very, very quickly went through the process to acquire them. And for the company, it was really a look at, can we grow this technology or is it going to be better to acquire it? And then how do we integrate it? And spent a lot of time on the integration piece. But once we looked at it, we said, you know what? We really had a lot of faith in what they were doing. We saw how it would marry with all the work we're doing and the founders are great. So you said you wanted to make sure you had the same values. I think a lot of people in the audience would go about that decision by saying, here's our best culture survey, you all need to fill it out, and then we're gonna compare and see if there's a match. I'm guessing you didn't do that. But how did you gauge what their values were? I spent a lot of time sharing what's important to General Motors and talking through our values and not just saying, at General Motors, we have three values of customer relationships and excellence, but it was really why are those our values and what do they mean and how do we live them every day? And then talking to them and you can learn a lot, especially at the time we acquired Cruise, they were 40 people. And so talking to the two founders and really understanding their passion and why they were doing what they were doing and their focus on the customer, high integrity, it was dialogue. It seems like that acquisition is part of your strategy to try to build more of a startup mentality, which is not easy in a century-old company. What else are you doing to get people to think about being innovative and creative? Well, one of the things is infusing the lessons from Cruise. So when I said we spent a lot of time thinking about the integration, we handpicked some people that we knew had tremendous experience in the company, had innovated themselves, and had the right mindset to be able to work with a startup. Because one of the things in, I think, large companies is you don't want to go hug your startup to death and put all your processes, process is good. If you don't have process, you can have chaos, but the process needed to run a 180,000-person organization versus a 40 that has now grown to about 600 is different. And so we put the right people to kind of be these, so that Cruise wasn't just getting inundated with General Motors, so they kind of were the stop, but then also they were the window into the company that what Cruise needed, they knew where to go get it. And I think that helped a lot for how the relationship, and then the power of storytelling. So we would tell a story about, one of my favorite stories is there was, we were on a call, and the Cruise team was on, or the leaders of the Cruise team were on, and somebody said, oh, we have this report. We'll schedule an hour meeting to go through it. And one of the leaders from Cruise said, could you just mail it, could you just email it to me? I'll look at it, and if I have any questions, I'll let you know. And think about how much your time is gated by, one of my pet peeves is please don't invite me to a meeting with a set of PowerPoint charts and then read them to me. Give them to me ahead of time, let me read them, and then let's go have a conversation and make a decision or figure out what we need to do next and engage more people, but please don't read me PowerPoint charts. But telling the story from the Cruise perspective, people went, well, you know, you're right. This report is self-contained, and it's information that doesn't need to be verbally presented. It can just be read at someone's, on their own time. And so continuing to pull stories out of how the startup drives efficiency and speed, but then I would also say what happened that is another story to tell is there were times that the 40 folks said, at first it was like, no, I don't need to do that, and they went, oh, yes, I do. That process helps. And so it's flown both ways, huge respect, but again, it was having the right people at the interface. One of the other places that data comes into your leadership is I think we're all curious about human behavior and what's changing, what we can learn about people that we don't normally see, and you've actually been collecting driving data for years through OnStar. Right. And I'm wondering, is there anything you've learned about human behavior through tracking driving habits, and is there anything you hope to learn moving forward? So a couple things. I think we're just in the infancy of really leveraging the power of the data that we're collecting through OnStar to, and there's a couple different things. We can use it to make better decisions in the company. We can use it to create value for that consumer, or we can use it, there's cases to anonymize and monetize it, and so we're in the early days. But a couple things that we've learned, one interesting one, we've been able to collect the data, and also this is through a website, is on electric vehicles. You get a lot of feedback if you're in an electric vehicle, are you driving as efficiently as possible? And it almost became, the Chevrolet Bolt EV actually has a website and it's kind of gamification because people wanna be like, I drove the most efficiently, so I got more miles than anyone else. And so that, how motivating that is for people, that was a big learning. I would also say we're trying, where we're trying to add value is we have a new application through OnStar called Marketplace, where we can, if you opt in to the areas you're interested in, we can then situationally provide you information or a discount on gas or a coupon at Dunkin' Donuts, or you can pre-order with a touch of one part, one button on the screen, your favorite coffee at Starbucks that you then drive through and pick up. So it's how do we connect in a very non-distracting way, create value with the data in the pipeline that we have back and forth into the car. So those are, we're just scratching the surface. You mentioned the Chevy Bolt, you beat Tesla there. And I'm wondering when the GM flamethrower is coming out. GM flamethrower, we're customer focused and we don't have a lot of data, customer data asking for that. Fair enough. Maybe soon. I wanna ask you about crisis management. So I think everyone's familiar with the ignition switch crisis that you faced. And in 2014, you were named crisis manager of the year for the way that you handled that. To me, that's the epitome of the worst situation to land in if you're somebody who loves data, because you have absolutely no idea how the decisions you make and the communication that you put out is going to influence people's reactions, whether that's customers, the stock market, or your own employees. How did you handle that crisis? Well, immediately we formed a small team and we met every day. And some day we met for two hours, some day we met for 20 minutes. Because the one thing sometimes on the outside people don't understand is that when you are in a crisis, it's not like you have perfect information on day one. I mean, in our situation specifically, we learned we had an issue and we acted. But then there was a lot to unfold. In vehicle safety, when you find an issue, one of the things we do is call a read across to say, okay, here's the specific situation that happened in this vehicle. Could this be happening on another vehicle, even if it's not the same part number or the same design? And so we go through that process. Through that, we learned a lot and took a lot of actions. So that's, I think, an important thing for people to understand as they look at others managing crisis. But I'd like people to understand, but the bottom line is a lot of people don't care. They just, what happened, what are you gonna fix it, how did you let this happen? And as we met every day, we quickly defined guiding principles based on our values. And so the first was we're gonna do everything possible for the customer, we're gonna be transparent, and we're gonna make sure we do everything in our power to make sure this never happens again. And that literally guided us every step of the way. And it was an opportunity in a very tragic situation. I've said many times, if I could turn back the clock, because as we look back at what happened, because the issues that caused this crisis in 2014 were actually engineered and designed in the late, early 2000s. I mean, when you look at the life of a vehicle. And so going back and really understanding that, and we've made tremendous changes to the way we engineer vehicles, the way we test and do safety and talk about that. But if I could have turned back the clock to make sure no one had lost a life because of this, absolutely would have. So having that focus, understanding the seriousness of the situation, being transparent, and I would also say follow your gut. Early on, you get advice from everyone and it conflicts. And I really went, spent a lot of sleepless nights and said, this just doesn't feel right. And no, we're gonna do this. No, we're going to say our sorry. No, we're going to do an independent investigation. We're gonna release the independent investigation. Just you've really, if you have values and the teams align, and you just, as you go through the twists and turns of what you learned as you go through the crisis, you just keep going back to that and it guides you on what to do. And two things are my big learnings from what I went through is I'm much more impatient than I used to be. If there's a problem or there's an issue, we gotta fix it. And so I'm much less tolerant of, people say, well, we'll get that in this month. Well, why can't you get it sooner? What can I do so you can fix this issue sooner, or we can have the technology be better, or we can provide this feature that creates value? It's not always about a negative thing. And then the other thing, and I'm really proud because I think it's fairly well through the company is we're gonna do the right thing even when it's hard. I mean, because when you have values that's really easy to live your values when everything's going well, it's really hard when everyone's looking at you and it's dramatically impacting your financial results. But if the company knows and they see you do it and then every employee knows, you're gonna do the right thing even when it's hard, that to me is so important for me to trust that we're doing the right thing at every level every day. I think when we first met, you were beginning to put a big focus on strengthening the safety culture. Yes. In the sort of, I guess, in the follow-up of handling this crisis. What are the changes that you made and what do you think has moved the needle the most on culture? I think living the values and having everyone know, but then one of the things, before I get to specifically the question on safety, one of the things we did in late 14, so fairly new leadership team. Most of us were in, even though we'd been at the company, we were in different seats because of the changes. And so in the fall of that year, our top 300 leaders from around the globe, we get together twice a year at the fall meeting. We asked everybody before they came to the meeting to do one thing and said, if you could change one behavior in the company, what would you change? And so they, 300 responses come in and it boiled down to about five things. And so we met for the day, we talked, we literally in a size probably similar to this room, but we really had a dialogue of, do we accept these are the things that we should do? And we left that day saying, tomorrow when we go to work, we are gonna start demonstrating these behaviors. I and my president, we both stood up in front and said, if you see us not living these behaviors, call us out. Now do it respectfully, but call us out. And I started to see change that day because at that point, there was so much talk about General Motors culture and it's not good. And I was like, how do I work on culture? Because to me, culture is the stories you tell about what happens at a company or an organization or a family or a country. And, but what I could do every day is change how I behave. And so we started to see change that next day. I believe the senior leadership that infusing these behaviors into the company generated the record performance we had in 15, 16 and 17. And we're still at it. In fact, I, this year, because I feel like we made improvements, but it's starting to level off. What I'm doing this year, and I had my first session yesterday in the next three to four months, I hope to talk to every one of these senior leaders in, because we've now state, we now have formal B, seven formal behaviors that we've rolled out to the whole company. But what are the leadership behaviors? What's our additional responsibility and behaviors we need to demonstrate? And we're working on that now. And just, I mean, I'm not, you know, sitting in a room saying, here's what they are. I'm actually engaging that team to say, help, let's write these together. And it's, I'm fully, you know, strongly believe behaviors set your culture and you can't fake, you know, what you do every day sets your culture. You can't pretend to have a culture that's different than what you're really doing. One thing that's clear in that story is how much you'd love to ask questions. And this is a growing topic of emphasis in management research, where we see that the question asking is a critical, but often neglected leader behavior. And yeah, I think one way to track that is you look at just the ratio of questions to statements that leaders make. And that ratio is sort of incalculable for some leaders, but that's not a good situation. I think you're the opposite of that. I've seen you do it many times where you might even gather a group of junior people in the room and they're there to learn from you, but you are firing away with lots of things you want to learn about. Do you have other favorite questions that you ask when it comes to shaping culture, when it comes to engaging and motivating employees? Oh, wow, I haven't thought about, I mean, I think that the most important is getting feedback from employees. And this actually early in my career, I was making a presentation to the senior staff and the CFO stepped out afterward and said, it was the first time it ever happened to me. And he stepped out and he said, did you get what you needed from that presentation and our response? And I was like somewhat stunned. I was like, wow, he wants to know if I got what I needed from that conversation when my mind was I'm presenting to the senior team. But that was really, and so I sat there and I said, you know what? Yes, I got all the direction I needed to go forward. At the time I was in internal communications. And so that really was impactful for me that a lot of times at the end of a meeting or an end of a presentation, asking that person, did you get what you need? Is there anything else you need to go forward? I think is vitally important. And in getting their opinion, how often do we have people come to us and just present a bunch of data and they're the closest to it yet. No, well, what do you think? And so those are just some of the things of asking, did you get what you need? And what do you think? So I think it was November. I got an email that said, Mary Barra would like to speak with you. And it kind of felt like being in first grade all over again. Oh no, I got called to the principal's office. What did I do wrong? Oh no. I'm in big trouble. But the call was about something I really didn't expect, which is you said, I'm gonna paraphrase, but you said, I've been working really hard on making sure that all of our senior people are mentoring not just people similar to them, which means men mentor women. It means white leaders mentor leaders who come from different backgrounds. And you mentioned that you were hearing from men that they were afraid to mentor women in the wake of Me Too. So how have you responded to that? Well, so I'm really sorry I made you feel like you were getting called to the principal's office. It's all right, I got over it. Okay. No, because as I thought about this issue, I really didn't have all the answers. And because you and I had conversations about engagement and the books you've written, I really wanted to hear your perspective because I didn't know what to do. And you and I had a great conversation. One of the things you suggested is that there's research now that says group mentoring is very important. But by talking to you, it gave me, I guess, the courage to go to my leadership team and then this top leadership team I spend a lot of time with and just talk about it without having all the answers and creating an environment where people said, yeah, I do worry about that now. And I didn't think about it, but how can I not think about it? Okay, well, what are we going to do? And then someone says, well, this is what I do. Or then we introduce the group, the fact of how powerful group mentoring could be. And I found just by putting a difficult topic out on the table without, and it wasn't, here's the problem and here's the four things you do. It was, let's talk about it. It caused everybody to be more aware of it and to realize they're not alone and that there's things we can all do together. And so it was really beneficial. I'm so glad you decided to ask a man for advice on this issue. But it's interesting to me because the group mentoring perspective was new for me in the sense that I'd been reading mentoring and sponsorship research. And I just seen over and over again that it's not about having one mentor or sponsor. You need a whole network of people developing you and watching your back. And I had been talking about this in class one day and then students said, well, you should have group office hours instead of individual office hours. And I was worried that they wouldn't necessarily then feel comfortable raising whatever personal concerns or questions they had. And they said, no, it gives us a chance to hear our classmates' questions and to learn from everyone else in the room. And then we also don't have to prepare as much and we're not as nervous about having a conversation. And I went and tried it and found that I liked it better too because I felt like I got to actually have a conversation about some big questions that were relevant to everyone as opposed to therapy. I'm not that kind of psychologist. So I'm curious about what the group mentoring idea has been like. How has it worked? How have you thought about bringing people together? Is it two mentors with a group of people? Is it one mentor with a whole group of reports? What does that look like? So I would say people have done it in very different ways. Sometimes it's a bigger group of people and they're talking. Sometimes it's been, okay, instead of, to your exact example, instead of me normally doing three one-on-ones, I'm gonna do a one-on with three people. But people have used the concept of having more people in the room and they've really customized it to fit what they're trying to accomplish. And so it was just this idea that has really just kind of permeated in many different ways. I would say we're also still continuing to talk, for instance, with our employee resource groups. How do we leverage it within the mentoring, some of the more formal mentoring program that happens there? And looking at now, our head of HR is looking at how do we maybe structure that formal mentoring a bit differently? So the Lean In team launched a mentor her movement saying, look, there are way too many men who will go out to dinner with their male mentees, but they won't do that with their female mentees. And that's not to say you have to go out to dinner with a woman, but if you're not gonna do it with women, you shouldn't do it for men either because it's not fair. And you joined, you brought your voice into that movement, but you also made it really transparent in the company and said, yeah, I'm gonna have a dialogue across General Motors. I'm even gonna share this on Yammer. What was that communication like? What was your message about mentoring women? Well, I think it was, some of it is similar to when I talked with my team. It was putting it out there. So as opposed to just being, oh, I'm just gonna do this and no one will notice that I've changed my behavior. It was putting that out there, making it visible, letting people talk about it. And one of the great things was from an employee, I got this great email from a young woman who said, I wanna share about my boss, Pete, because my boss, Pete, has mentored me, he's given me great advice, and he's still continuing to mentor me. And then I sent him a note and because it was, we were able to have it kind of across the company, it got a lot of recognition. And I think some of these things is, there's no perfect solution. So you just gotta get people past the discomfort and make everyone aware. And whether it's group mentoring solutions or continuing to mentor or slightly changing things, but not stopping. Because I know, I mean, I've had so many mentors in my 38-year career without the mentors and without the dedication to diversity. And many of these mentors have been men. I wouldn't sit as the CEO of General Motors today. So when I heard it and when I saw the Survey Monkey lean in data, it was disturbing to me. And as important as the Me Too movement is, because I think people finally feel, in many different cultures, what's happening is not acceptable and people will listen and believe and take action is so important as well. But you don't wanna have this other negative outcome. And so we've talked about both in the company. And again, we don't have all the perfect solutions, but just having it out there, having people talk about it, I think is taking us to a better place. So for a roomful of people who are experts in talent analytics, social science, data science, I'd love to hear, as a CEO, what data would you most love to have on people? So we have people studying, how do you hire better? How do you build more effective teams? How do you strengthen a culture? How do you improve performance reviews? What are the things that you would most want data on, people-related, that you don't have? All those things. Done. How many hours do you have? But I think we are doing a lot with our, I'll call it the people analytics. One of the things that I, we do a workplace of choice survey every 18 months to two years. We're actually in the process of people are doing the survey online right now. I can't wait to get that information because we've really used it. And it's done by an outside company's system. So if a person has more than five direct reports at a first level, first supervisor level, they get feedback that they can use. It's our whole company, our representative employees as well. We've got really high, and one of the things I've always, I've learned through this is when someone asks, when you ask somebody a question and they give you advice and they tell you what they need, if you don't do it, the next time they ask you, they're gonna be like, why am I bothering to give you input? So we've worked really hard. We started doing these surveys in 2012 and so 14, 16, now 18, and making sure that people know. And each year we've seen our participation grow and we look at it at a corporate level. We'll dissect this information so many different ways but really make it actionable. And I think it's so important. I talk to my board about it every year and look at the data analytics and the human capital. But right now I'm also focused on how do we hire better? And are there assessments we can do? And not just to say yay or nay, but if we bring someone in with that assessment, how do we best help them understand the organization? Or if they have a strength here in some areas that they're not as strong, how do we customize how we're gonna onboard them to make sure they're as successful as possible? But each of the areas, again, I think data can be so important to drive enabling and empowering the talent. That's such an interesting take on hiring assessments because normally when we have assessments as part of the hiring process, we figure out who we wanna bring into the company and then we basically throw their data away. I know very few leaders who actually pay attention to that information once people are brought in. Is there anything you've done or started thinking about from an onboarding perspective to begin customizing? We've just done this recently. This is something we've been working on over the last several months. But one of the things is when we made a decision to hire the person, the senior leaders that are gonna be interfacing with this person the most, we literally said, okay, look, this is where this person could hit some roadblocks and literally said, okay, who's gonna kind of take on that mentoring role to observe and if it happens, provide feedback? And then also just making a couple key people aware. This happened to be, is the person gonna speak up in big forums? Once you know that, you can easily just say, hey Adam, what do you think? No one has to know, oh, excuse me, I'm gonna ask Adam what he thinks because he doesn't often speak up in, no, it's you just do it as respect. Then they start to build that muscle, they know it's valued and so it was more looking, okay, what could be something that would cause this person to fail? Let's be deliberate about not letting it happen. I think one of the challenges that we face when we do that is people analytics is a science in the sense that we wanna get rigorous about data. But it's also an art in the sense that we have to figure out what to measure in the first place. And I think very often we're measuring the wrong things. I'm wondering if you could just talk to us a little bit about what you look for when you hire especially senior leaders. And maybe that will call our attention to other things that we ought to be assessing that we're not currently thinking about. I mean, to me, it starts with integrity. I want to make sure that the person is of the highest integrity, kind of that's gonna do the right thing even when it's hard and that's like foundational for me. I would also say when, because General Motors is a big complex business, there's been times in the past where we brought in leaders and they're six, eight, a year in and they're still talking like they're this outside consultant. And it's like kind of like, you are they or you are they. Because that's the, jump in the boat, be, own the problem, be part of it. I mean, so even when you talk to people, you can almost tell in an interview when they start to say, they almost interview like they're already at the company, but in a respectful way where they're not over assuming anything. And so that, hey, I'm gonna be part of the team. Because we're a matrix organization, being able to work well in a team and being able to have to accomplish things through influence, not just hierarchical power is very important. And then actually, having a passion for our industry. So I mean, those are just a handful of things that I look for. There's probably more if I sat and looked. I mean, and obviously you're looking for technical capability in their area, but those are just a few. So as the follow up, if I were to come in an interview for a job working for you, what would be your favorite interview questions to ask to get at any of those traits? One of the things I love to ask people is how would your peers describe you? And then when they answer that, how would your supervisors describe you? And I'll say, give me three adjectives. Three adjectives of how your peers would describe you. How does your boss, and then the last I'll ask, how would your, if people work for you or you've led teams, how would they describe you? And you learn so much because how much that changes, because ideally you don't want it to change. You know, you don't want people who manage up differently and you want them to work well with their peers and empower their teams. And so that's one of my favorite questions. And I don't say I'm gonna ask three questions. And you know, when you say three adjectives, it rolls pretty quickly and you learn a lot about a person by the way they answer that question. Is there a self-awareness element to that answer too? That I have to not only be aware of what my qualities are, but also I have to think about what other people believe my qualities are? I think that's really important. I haven't asked, you know, from a, that perception piece, but generally I find in the answers, people will, they believe it as well. They're not gonna give you some, well everybody thinks I'm this, but I'm really that. I mean, and obviously it's an interview question, so they're gonna be trying to be as positive as possible. I also find a really interesting question is asking people about, you know, what do you think your weaknesses are and how they handle that? Because if we all subscribe, we all have weaknesses, so if we subscribe to that, how do they, you know, how authentic are they as they answer that question? And do they go right into, but here's what I do to address that. You know, those are questions I really learn a lot from. So as we wrap up, I'd love to hear your take on the worst career advice you've ever been given. The worst, two moments in my career were kind of the lowest, and one was as I was expecting my first child, and my oldest child is gonna be 21 in a few weeks, so it's a long time ago, but was pretty much being told that I shouldn't work once my child was born. And that was, you know, that was, and I always try to assume goodness with people, but that one got really hard. And then I would say the other, when I was actually in a performance review, this was very early in my career, and the supervisor was giving me advice, and he said, yeah, and you know, then we were in a meeting, and I asked a whole bunch of people about you, and they said they didn't know you very well, but this is what they said. And I'm like, well, why would I even value that? You know, if you, I don't know, I mean, I guess I can take it as, okay, this is a perception, but I didn't, you know, and maybe I need, so I looked at it so much, and you and I have talked about this in the past, that feedback is, I do believe feedback is a gift, and the receiver is the one who controls, because you can obviously tell in that one case I didn't value it very much, and so I didn't listen to it, but I think if feedback is delivered, and it's credible, and the person has established with you, they genuinely want you to be a better, to be your better self. And so when I felt times when I didn't feel that they cared about me, is when I've pretty much discarded it. Well, Mary, it's an honor to have you here at Wharton, especially since you did your MBA at Stanford, and we're grateful that you were willing to come and share your wisdom with us. Thank you. Well, I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, everyone.