Leadership Dialogues Featuring GM's CEO Mary Barra

Good afternoon. We'll try that one more time. Good afternoon. Welcome to the inaugural Leadership Dialogue Series, powered by the Sanger Leadership Center. My name is Jeff Tamagala, and I have the privilege of serving as our managing director. We're excited to welcome you here tonight. This is our new series, a Fireside Chat-style event featuring accomplished industry, political, non-profit leaders discussing ideas in organizational research and ongoing practice alongside a University of Michigan faculty member. We're launching this series, and we hope to have about three to four events a year between business leaders and faculty on the changing face of business and the role that leaders and leadership plays. We're very excited to introduce you to both our moderator and our speaker today, but before we do so, I'd like to share a bit more information on the Sanger Leadership Center. At the Sanger Leadership Center, our mission is to accelerate leader development through bold ideas, transformative experiences, and inclusive communities. We do that by bringing in faculty's research and research from around the world, infuse it into our programs, and have that be available to you as students. All of you here today make us excited about our vision, being a vision, being a center that serves broadly a wide variety of people. Our center's endowment enables us and our programming to achieve a lot, whether it's through StoryLab, a program on storytelling, whether it's Crisis Challenge, navigating crisis among students, or whether it's Leadership Dialogues. We're excited to welcome you here today. Our Sanger Research Lab, our faculty, our PhD students, and our staff produces our bold ideas that shape the academic and practitioner side of our center. We're excited to be welcoming you here today. What I'd like to do first is I'd like to introduce our moderator, Lindy Greer. Dr. Lindy Greer is a professor of management and organizations here at Michigan Ross. She serves as our faculty director at the Sanger Leadership Center. Her research focuses on how to lead effective organizational teams with specific interests in leadership skills and conflict management, diversity and inclusion, vision crafting, and the communication of emotions. Lindy is published in top management and psychology research outlets, such as the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and the Journal of Applied Psychology. Her work has been covered in well-known media outlets, including New York Times, Forbes, and Fast Company. Lindy is currently the associate editor at the Academy of Management Journal and on boards of six of the top management and psychology journals, and has served on boards of professional associations, such as the International Association of Conflict Management and Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management. In just a moment, we'll welcome Lindy Greer. Lindy will have the pleasure of engaging in the fireside chat alongside our speaker, Mary Barra. We are so honored and pleased to have Mary Barra to serve as our inaugural speaker at this event. Mary Barra is the chair and chief executive officer of General Motors. Under Barra's leadership, GM envisions a world with zero crashes to save lives, zero emissions so future generations can inherit a healthier planet, and zero congestion so customers can get back to a precious commodity, time. Prior to becoming CEO, Barra served as GM's executive vice president for global product development, purchasing and supply chain since August of 2013, and as senior vice president of the global product development since February of 2011. In these roles, Barra and her teams were responsible for the design, the engineering, and the quality of GM vehicle launches worldwide. Previously, she served as vice president for global human resources, vice president global manufacturing, and plant manager for the Detroit Amtramx Assembly. She graduated with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering in 1985, followed by a master's degree in business administration from Stanford Graduate School. And she is a diehard University of Michigan fan growing up and going to the big house. Let's please give a round of applause and warm welcome to our moderator, Lindy Greer, and our speaker, Mary Barra. Thank you, Mary, so much for being here today. It is an absolute pleasure to launch this series for Michigan Ross with such an amazing speaker. Well, I'm so happy to be here. As I said, University of Michigan and the Ross School of Business has a special place in my heart, so I'm excited to be here. I wanna have a first playful question to get going, which is as CEO of a car company, this could be a dangerous question, but what is your favorite car of all time and why? That is a really tough question, especially for when I was in product development because I realized each vehicle in our portfolio plays a special role. Through my life, I've been a big fan of the Camaro, although I really like the Corvette. The C8 is just a phenomenal sports car, but frankly, right now, I'm driving a Hummer EV, and I also, one of the best parts of my job is I get to drive a lot of our future vehicles, so I really probably can't pick one, but I guess I'd say I'm so excited about the electric portfolio that we have coming and we're starting to launch right now, so it's the most fun part of my job. It's great. Well, I wanna talk a little bit first just about you and your journey as a leader. What you've achieved to be a woman CEO of one of our big three car companies is incredible, so at Sander, we talk a lot about this idea of a leadership journey that our team sitting in the front row has crafted together over how we can develop as leaders, over how, if we look into the future and then backtrack to say, hey, if I wanna be CEO of a company like Merion one day, what do I need to be doing at Michigan Ross right now, looking at all our students, to develop myself, and we help our students then have the time for coaching, for reflection, for goal setting, transformative experiences to learn these skills. So I'd be curious, as you're looking back on your career, what were the things that helped you most to get to where you are today in this amazing position with a chance to create real change in the world? So, I mean, I've had a 40-year career at General Motors. I started as a co-op student, so that's counted in that time and also I had the opportunity through GM to attend business school, and I think, there's been different steps along the way. First, getting an undergrad in engineering and then actually working in one of our plants. My encouragement to you would be, whatever industry you go into, really understand the core of the business. And nothing really happens till an automobile rolls off the line at General Motors. All the services and everything we can do beyond that, it starts though with producing that vehicle. So having that experience to actually work in an assembly plant early in my career, I think was very important. When I went to business school, I have to say, as going to a small engineering school, Kettering, at the time it was General Motors Institute, I didn't know what I didn't know. And so going to business school, and I took a variety of classes, from tax to corporate finance, I mean, a lot of required classes, but also a lot of operations management classes because I always had an interest in manufacturing. But I really felt that that was a great way to round out, really understanding how business works, how business is measured, what's important. And then with each of the assignments that I had, I always tried to make sure that I was in the core of what we do, which is whether it was in the engineering, the manufacturing of vehicles. Because again, I felt it was important to really be at the core of what we do. The two years that I got to spend in HR was an added bonus because at the end of the day, the success of every company is about its people. And are you attracting the best and the brightest talent and the talent that's passionate about what your industry does, your company does. So I'd say those are a handful of things that I've learned through my career. I think you have to balance being very intentional about staying in the areas that you have passion for, that are the stepping stones to get you to senior leader roles, while also not being so committed to a plan that you don't just seize those wonderful opportunities that come in front of you, those ones that make your stomach a little bit of a pit in your stomach, going, oh, I'm not sure what I'm doing. Those are the ones you also have to seize. So that's how I've really looked at my career and tried to make sure I understood key parts of the business. And in the job I have now, having worked in an assembly plant, having been a plant manager, having been responsible for product development, having understood the human resource process, all of those things I think really round out to give me a lot of the skills that I need and the challenges that I have today that I'm faced with as the CEO. That's so interesting. I have this research paper actually showing that the best leaders have the most generalist competence. And if you wanna lead, you actually have to have expertise for the task at hand, but also that generalist view over the whole company, be it operations or HR, super interesting. Can I follow up on that one just a little bit in terms of just on the fly, year to year, how did you learn leadership? How do you manage a team or manage an organization? Did you have time for reflection or how? I think the way I learned the most was you learn something from every leader you work for. You either learn what you wanna do more of or you learn what you certainly don't wanna ever be seen as when you get the opportunity to manage. So you learn from everyone. You learn from a great leader, you learn from somebody you don't deem as a great leader. But what I would say is I think early in my career, I worked for someone who, and this was in the manufacturing field, who taught me that you really have to win the hearts and minds of your team. And so I think the most effective leaders really care, truly care about the people that work for them, want them to have the best, invest in them, and that kind of passion, because there's so many challenges that you're going to have that you wanna have, you wanna build a relationship with your team or with your peers or even with your supervisors that they know you're gonna work hard, they know you care. So as you face difficult situations, you're kind of like, hey, those are the people I wanna have on my team because I know we're gonna work really hard and we're gonna figure out how to solve the problem. So I think it was early on, realizing you've gotta win the hearts and minds of the people you work with and communicate so they understand not only what we need to do, but the why. And as I've seen great leaders do that, again, I've had the opportunity to work for many, many great leaders, and so trying to make sure that I try to put all those tools in my toolkit or observations, that's been really a part of how I formed my leadership. Yeah, that's so important. At Stainer, we have these programs called Story Lab, where it's like, how do you learn to tell an emotional, compelling story from the heart? And it's fun to make those connections and of how important it is to lead an organization like you're doing. So one type of leadership that you've shown that's a lot about leading hearts and minds is DEI change management. So I was really impressed when reading more about all you've done at GM on this topic, including the fact that it's only one of three top global businesses and doesn't have a gender pay gap. I mean, stand still by that. What a huge achievement. Tell me how you got there. And the work that you're doing. How did you get there? What's next? Well, I would say, first on the no gender pay gap, we work at it, we study it. I mean, and we've been doing this for years. So as it became topical, there's a certain part of me that went, doesn't every company do what we do of actually assess the data, understand where people are at in the different positions in the company to make sure that there's no bias there. And so, and if we find it, we fix it. And so, I can't take any credit for it. Sherry, Sherry Alexander, who worked at General Motors for many years in the HR field was one of the leaders that just instituted that as a process that General Motors had for years and years and years. And frankly, as we implement better HR systems, we can even be better at it because we have more data to get more refined to make sure that we're addressing that. So again, it's something I'm proud of and something I can take absolutely no responsibility for. But I think when we look at, we've been working from a diversity perspective for many years. In fact, I would say 20, 25 years ago, investments made in me as the company was focused on developing people of color, developing women, giving them opportunities, is why I was ready eight years ago to be able to be in a position to be even in the dialogue of becoming the CEO. That doesn't happen overnight. It happens 10, 15, 20 years earlier in your career. And General Motors had, again, it's like one of the best kept secrets, but had a pretty robust diversity program where leaders held their leaders accountable to make sure that they were developing diverse talent. And so, that's been a fundamental. But one of the things I've learned is it's not something, once you're doing it well, it doesn't automatically keep happening. You've gotta continually invest in it. And so, it's been something I consider myself at General Motors to be the chief diversity officer. We have a person whose total role is our chief diversity, equity, and inclusion. But I feel that it's very important that I feel that accountability, and I hold my direct team responsible for their results. I meet with them each individually, and we look at how are they doing on hiring diverse talent, promoting, training, and advancing. And so, there's a piece of it where you do have to look at the numbers, and the numbers tell the story. One of the things we do at General Motors for the top 250 positions is, because that's something my leadership team, we feel like we've gotta own the top talent in the company to make sure we've got the right cross-functional moves, so we actually look at all movement into that top group. But if there's, one of the things we ask for and I look at it for every single promotion or job change that we have is, was there a diverse slate? And you also have to be real about that, because it's really easy to say, oh yes, here's the three people that were diverse that were considered, but were they really? And so, what I've kind of said is, don't just make up a slate for me. If you don't have a diverse slate when you had to make this selection, tell me what you're gonna do so three years from now you will. And I ask that question as we're looking, many times we're promoting a diverse candidate, or there was a diverse slate, but that's one of the things that we focus on continually. And then the last thing I'll say though, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and really what do we want? We want a workforce, we want a workplace, we want a culture where everybody comes to work and feels they can be their true self, they can be their best self, and therefore they can do their best work. And creating an environment that recognize and accepts differences, that celebrates differences. We don't always have to agree on everything, but as we come to work every day, we have to respect the differences. And that's what we're working to create. And we're on a journey. I think it's a journey we'll never say we're done. But I'd ask you, how many people in this room, in your career, have felt uncomfortable or not valued at work? Okay, how did that feel? Pretty crappy, right? Why would we want anyone else to feel that way? Again, we don't have to agree on every single thing. We don't have to agree on virtually anything, but we should respect each other and make sure that people's voices are heard. And we want different points of view as we're making decisions, or looking at how we should design a vehicle, or how we should approach a different task. So I think one of the things I learned from one of the people in our diversity team, is she said, at the end of the day, we can talk about it and there's so much research, it's how we make each other feel. And that's something that I really took to heart, because every day I can reflect and say, with the 10, 20, 100 people I interfaced with, did I make them feel valued, respected? Or did I dismiss them? And that's something I can ask myself every day and hold myself accountable to. And imagine if we all did that, everybody, we wouldn't have a room of people all raising their hands that at some point in their career they didn't feel valued or respected. So we're on the journey, we don't always get it right, but that's the journey that we're on at General Motors. And just so many good things I'm gonna answer. So one, I wanted to talk about data. So Michigan just launched a new class on data analytics for DEI. And it's interesting that GM was so far ahead of the game for that, really cool to hear. Resources has to go to DEI, I also heard you say, have a research paper that just came out showing that if you don't fund DEI efforts, they actually backfire. And so I love that. And the third one, I actually wanna ask a follow-up question on, which is, how do we create a culture where we can celebrate difference? You know, the world needs more of that now. How have you found ways to scale that? To where you're able to really move the needle, not just on the numbers, but also on the culture? You know, again, I would say we're still learning, so I don't wanna give anybody the impression, I mean, we still are learning, like I think the whole business world and any organization is learning how to be better. But one of the ways we found is really effective is doing listening sessions. And it can be at all levels of the company. You know, after the George Floyd murder, after that happened, we really, at General Motors, that's when we really launched our equity inclusion, that's when we named somebody above our person who focused on diversity in that team. But we also started listening sessions at all different levels of the company. And, you know, I think a lot of us make assumptions, but listening and understanding and really demonstrating that empathy and putting yourself in someone else's shoes, I thought, you know, really helped everybody start to recognize that those differences and different backgrounds and experiences can be very, first of all, you learn a lot, and you're like, wow, I never knew that. I can now be a better, you know, I can be better attuned to what I do because I've learned something new from people I had no idea what they've gone through or what their experience was at General Motors or what their experience was in a different country where they grew up. And so I think listening and listening to really learn, apathetic listening, not listening to, you know, file it away in a certain place or negate it, but just listening and taking it all in, I think, has been one of the things that has helped people advance. So we're still learning and experimenting. We're, you know, we're doing training. We start a lot of our meetings, because safety is so important because we want everybody to leave in the same way they came to work, maybe a little tired, but whether they're working in one of our plants or in design or R&D or engineering, wherever they're working, we want everybody to return home safely, every person, every site, every day. But we also recognize that starting a meeting with a safety message, we could also start a message with an inclusion message and for people to understand and just to keep adding to that body of knowledge because, you know, once you know, it's hard to, it changes how you think. So just a few things that we're working on on the journey. I love those hacks. So more listening, and I love inclusion shares at the start of the meeting. Dana, do we want to do more of that one? That sounds great. So another topic I wanted to delve into, speaking of listening, is crises. And you've led successfully through some big ones, the ignition shift in front of Congress, a global pandemic, supply chain issues. What was the toughest one for you personally as a leader and how did you get through it and get your organization through it? Yeah, I think the toughest one was the ignition switch recall because unfortunately, you know, there was a series of steps that were taken that people didn't understand, but it led to tragic consequences because some people lost their lives. So I think that was the hardest, to recognize that over a series of 10 years, we didn't, we hadn't actually, the ironic thing in the ignition switch is most people feel like, oh, you finally were caught. We actually finally figured it out and went forward and kind of reported ourselves, but it took too long. And so, you know, what I learned, there were so many things I learned about it. You know, right away first, we got a team together because when you're in a crisis, day one, you don't know everything. You just don't know. You're in this information gathering of what happened? What really happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? And that doesn't unfold in a, you know, a 30 minute meeting. It unfolds over the course of days and weeks and sometimes months. And so we gathered a team of people and we were guided by three principles. We're gonna do everything we can. One, we're gonna be transparent. We're gonna do everything we can to support the customer and we're gonna do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again. And we were guided by those three principles. And I think one of the things is we, the first one about being transparent. If anyone thinks in, whether you're in a five person organization or a, you know, 50,000 or 150,000 organization, you can't, you know, when you've got an issue, you've gotta be transparent. And, you know, today with how fast, you know, the speed of communications moves, you know, maybe think you have days, but generally in times you have hours. And so being transparent, and we admitted that we were wrong. We admitted that we were sorry. And then we started going about the steps we needed to take. So what other bigger, as I reflect now after eight years, what did we learn? One is you've gotta do the right thing even when it's hard. You know, it's easy to do the right thing when everything's going really well and hope that everyone has smooth sailing, but when things aren't going well, so many people think they have a choice, but generally there's only one right thing to do and you just have to do it. And, you know, the other thing I've learned is when you know you have a problem, that you've gotta solve it. The best time to solve a problem is the minute you know you have it, because let's face it, how many problems go away on their own? Virtually none. What problems actually do is they just get bigger and more complicated. Had we been able to figure out earlier what happened, it would have been a much, you know, different outcome from, you know, lives that were impacted and frankly costs as well, and learnings to make the company better. So when you have a problem, the minute you know you have it, start working on solving it. Be transparent and recognize you gotta do the right thing even when it's hard. Thank you so much, Sarah. Our big event is a crisis challenge where students have 24 hours where the events unfold. And I feel like anybody sitting here doing the crisis challenge has got the cheat sheet. Thank you for that. So the next one I wanted to move into is another key aspect of leadership skills that is important that we try to help our students develop here is ability to be a visionary and to think forward into the future of where the world's going. So I'd be curious for where you think, one, the automotive industry as a whole is going in the next 10 years. And secondly, where GM will be in that landscape. Sure. Well, we call it at General Motors, we call it ambidextrous leadership. You've gotta be doing your, you know, you gotta manage the business today, but you have to be looking over the horizon. And I would say that's more important now than it ever has been because the world is, first of all, changing because of whether it's a pandemic or, you know, supply chain challenges we've never had. Or now, you know, the terribly tragic war that, you know, really the world is facing. There's so many things that are outside of your control, but you really have to be, you know, so you have to, can't just say, oh, well, here's my plan for the year. You have to be like, it's almost daily, you need to be looking at what's changing, what's happening and be agile and respond to that. But then you do have to be looking over the horizon for, you know, where are the opportunities and where are the threats. And so we try to kind of, you know, make sure actually one of our behaviors is look ahead. And we have eight behaviors in the company that we ask everyone, whether it's one team or winning with integrity or look ahead, be inclusive. And we try to reinforce that. It's actually part of our recognition system. And we have a recognition system in the company where anyone can recognize anyone. But when they recognize someone, they identify it with one of our eight behaviors. Was this person identifying be inclusive or one team or looking ahead or being bold? And I think that helps also reinforce the need for everyone to be looking ahead. But it's something you have to really challenge yourself to do. Often what we do is we try to pull out dedicated time. We had a team together of about 50 or probably 30 people this past Saturday, because we needed to separate ourselves from the demands of the day-to-day business to look ahead and say, okay, how is this gonna look in five years, in 10 years, and really have a discussion where everybody, yes, they gave up a Saturday, but they came in fresh. And it was frankly something I look forward to because we were gonna be able to dedicate five, six hours to just this one topic. So I think because if you are responding to the demands of the business all day, and it's at nine o'clock at night, and you've worked hard and you're tired, is probably not gonna be when your best look over the horizon thinking is going to occur. So you have to give yourself the space and time. And for me, I always think it's better done in a team with different points of view. And if you had to describe that world and where you're looking at, is it entirely electric? Is it the same amount of car companies now? Is it only public transportation, not private? Where might we be going? You know, there's so much. I mean, at General Motors, we believe in an all-electric future. We also believe in an autonomous future. If you, you know, as we look at trying to make the world, you know, zero crashes as part of our mission, autonomous plays a big role in that because today, over 90%, I think it's 94% of fatalities in the United States are due to human error. So if you could imagine, if you have the technology to have a self-driving vehicle, we actually have one running in San Francisco right now during, in a 70% of the San Francisco city, about, I think we run it for about six hours. Right now, we're kind of growing the timeline. So it's 10 o'clock to, I think, 4 a.m. But we'll continue to grow the time and we'll continue to grow the diameter till we get to the whole city. You have a vehicle that, and I've had the opportunity to ride in it twice, I've been out there twice since we started doing that, and it's like this perfect driver who's paying attention all the time, who knows, you know, knows the speed limit at all times, knows all of the traffic safety laws and is actually paying attention, isn't distracted, isn't under the influence of something. And think about a world where, in some places, we can move that way. We don't exactly know how transportation, but we know AV and EV are going to be a big part of it. We think in dense urban environments, autonomous will be more important, but we actually saw through COVID, people really value their own transportation. I know many of you who are students maybe, you know, totally rely on shared, whether it's Uber, Lyft, or, you know, buses, et cetera. But as you get to different stages in your life, you know, whether, my favorite example, because I lived it, is when you've got two kids in a stroller, a diaper bag, and two car seats, I'm not sure I'm going to be taking Lyft everywhere I go. But, you know, that's just the world that we're imagining and finding better solutions for. So, you know, whether it's personal autonomous vehicles, autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, you know, we're planning for, you know, kind of to, we know the key technologies that are going to be important. We're trying to lead in those technologies. And then, you know, we have a view that I won't, you know, completely lay out for you because it's competitive information, but having the key technologies is critical to be able to respond to how consumers want to live their lives and how transportation movement is so important. Thank you. So that requires enormous change management as a leader. I've taken a traditional car company and totally pivoting into new technology and new ways of working. Could you tell me a little bit about how you've gone about change management in terms of people, capabilities, resources, strategy, to change the organization to an entirely new way of being? I think it first starts with getting the leadership team aligned. And leading a large company has its set of challenges. If the leadership team isn't aligned, it's virtually impossible. But that's not just me saying this is the future. It's getting together. And again, we have a very diverse leadership team, people from other industries, from other companies, different points in their career, different training from an educational background, different experiences. And all that comes together and we try to look ahead of what do we think the world is going to be and then set our strategy. And that alignment is important. And in some cases, it's not like we all necessarily agree, but we all agree, okay, with all this discussion, here's the plan, here's where we're gonna go. So that's the kind of alignment I'm talking about. And then it's communicating, communicating, communicating. You really need to make sure your team understands not only the what, but the why. Because one of the things I love about General Motors, if the talent of the team, if they understand not only what they're doing, but why they're doing it, they're just unstoppable. And my best example of that is ventilators. When we were early into the crisis with the pandemic, General Motors has a rich history of coming to the aid of the country, whether it was in World War II or many other examples. And so I got a call from actually another CEO who said, I wanna introduce you to this small ventilator company that makes 250 ventilators a month. And we think you can help scale them. From that first call, two days later, we had a team at their facility in Washington State. 30 days later, we were producing ventilators. And we ended up growing to a rate where we were producing 10,000 a month for three months. We built, in about 154 day, we built 30,000 ventilators. If I had gone to the team before the crisis and said, okay, I need you to, how quickly can you make these ventilators? Here's the design, how quickly can you make them? You know, my guess is they would have said, oh, like 18 months. And they did it in a month because they knew what they were doing and they knew why. When we had to deal with semiconductor shortages, when people understood, okay, here's the chips we're gonna get, here's the ones we're not, how do we optimize for our most in-demand products? They figured, you know, then they figured it out. And so I think, you know, getting everyone to understand where you're headed and why is critically important. And at times, if there's someone who really doesn't agree, they need to leave and find happiness elsewhere because that alignment is so important to having everybody understand the mission. What I, you know, when we have put out some of our goals of wanting to be all electric in our light duty vehicles by 2035, when we made that announcement and said we plan to be carbon neutral by 2040, our applications to the company went up. Because what we also know, and I think this is people graduating today, much more, I think, connected that they wanna not only work for a company where they're gonna have a good job, but they wanna work for a company that aligns with their values and is gonna change the world. And that's where they choose to work because in today's market, you know, talent has the choice to go where they wanna go. I actually had a question exactly on this. The GM has a very young workforce compared to many of the auto companies. You know, how does that dovetail with the changes you're doing? What came first? Did you have a younger workforce that helped make it easier to jump into EV? Or are you starting to go to EV and autonomous and then the younger workforce came? And how are you managing the culture around this? So it's a little of both. You know, I would say we just ended up, just because of the structure of the company, we had a lot of natural attrition. And so, you know, right now with the company of our technical talent for sure, but if we look across our whole salaried workforce globally, most people, 40% of people have been with the company less than five years. And that was a lot of just due to natural retirement. As that attrition occurred, we were able to shift the resources to more software-based engineers because the vehicle, in addition to battery electronics, the vehicle is also becoming, is a software, not becoming, it is a software platform. And so that allowed us to make that change. But, you know, I'd also say, you know, very different than 40 years ago when I started at GM, I would never have thought, well, first of all, we didn't have email. I know you're like going, oh my God, how old is she? But we didn't have email. We used to fax things to each other or pick up the phone, which is not always something we should probably do a little bit more of. But anyway, we used the, you know, communicating and getting people to really understand where we're headed and getting the message out and making sure that everybody understood. We used that to be a, you know, a really important piece of getting that understanding. So, you know, as we look at getting that alignment, but what I would also say is I've never, now I probably get two to three emails a week from an employee saying, what do you think about this? Or here's what I think we should be doing. But one of my favorites was, and I respond to every one of them where I send them to someone and ask them to respond on my behalf if I don't have the right, you know, the most information. They don't need to just, you know, hear me, you know, give a high level answer if I know somebody can type a response in 30 seconds because that's what they do all day long and they're the expert on it. But I had one from an engineer who wanted to really know our commitment early on to battery electric vehicles. And so I said, you know, I shared with him that we were committed and he came to me, he's actually one of our battery engineers, so I think he wanted to make sure he was at the right company. And about three years later, he was actually presenting at one of our investor day on batteries and he said, you know, I sent you that note because I wanted to know if you personally were committed because if you weren't, I was gonna choose to go somewhere else. So, you know, we live in this world now where it's not the hierarchy I used to think about, but, you know, people feel free to reach out and we have to create that environment where, you know, people know you're doing what you say you're going to do and you mean, you have a vision and it's not just something that is on a banner on the wall, but it's real. I'm inspired by that. That's really amazing. A lot of my research is on hierarchy and how do you make hierarchy feel less hierarchical? You know, in order for organizations to innovate, to be agile, to go electric, you have to feel flat. You know, and to be able to flatten all the layers of organization where people feel comfortable to reach out is really amazing. Yeah, you have to, I mean, to me it's always a blend. I mean, like I said, I welcome, you know, the emails I get. I mean, you know, some of it, because if they're serious. If, you know, I'm getting somebody, you know, that wants to change the work schedule because it doesn't work for their personally, you know, then I'm like, okay, I'm gonna turn that over to our head of HR and let, you know, that person. But if it's a serious question about the company and where we're going, I take that very seriously. But you do need structure in a company because at General Motors, for instance, at any point in time, we have 100 vehicle programs in flight. That means they're on the conceptual drawing board till they're being built in a plan. If we don't have some type of structure to make decisions to make sure we're safely building high quality vehicles that are safe, we're gonna have chaos. And so you've gotta find that right blend where people feel that they can be bold and they can speak out and they can reach high in the organization, but also that we're following process and hierarchy to make sure we deliver high quality, safe vehicles to people every day. So it's a balance. My gosh, you just made my day. That's my research paper of the year I'm working on is you need hierarchy, but it needs to be flexed. That you need the hierarchy, but you need what we call bursts of flatness, where there's clear structure, clear coordination, but the moments where people can brainstorm and reach out and ideate. Well, and a perfect example of that is in the ventilator project, there was no level. Well, there was one leader, but it was more like a captain of the team and getting all the different skill sets to work on the team to get the job done. And so it was very flat with a coach and a roadblock buster. So that was a burst. So cool. Okay, well, I know we have a lot of questions in the audience. So let me turn it over to you all for the last maybe 10 minutes or so, and then I'll call it back up for the final question. So we have a first hand up here in the second row. No, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, great. Hi, my name is Tiffany Sedek. I'm a professor from the law school, but I came here from GM. So I worked at GM for quite a while. One thing that actually stuck out to me when you were talking about how there's like less pay disparity is something I wanted to throw out there really quick. It was the only place I've ever worked where every year I got an email telling me how much I made in comparison to other people my level. So I thought the first time I got that, I thought like, oh, is that an accident? Did you need to send that to me? But it's great to know where you stand with comparable people. But one question I had for you was when I've been in leadership positions, I sometimes struggle with how much to be democratic and get consensus and how much to just like be the leader and make the decision. And when you've had to make tough decisions where there's not a clear answer, like so an example would be like selling off the European car makers, like where it's like, I don't know for sure this is right. Like we kind of know like electric vehicles, at some point that will be the future and we need to be a first mover, but in something where it's like, I don't know the answer. How much do you get consensus and how much do you just say, okay, I'm the leader and I need to make a decision and how do you navigate which course to go and big decisions like that where there's not a clear answer. But you know, when I first became a leader of people at General Motors, I went to this leadership class and one of the, you know, this was many, many moons ago, but I remember one thing I learned in that class is don't ask a question if you already know the answer. You know, like if you say, look, hey everybody, let's, I don't know, let's arrange the office, I'm making up something silly, let's arrange the office this way, what do you think? If you ask people what do you think and then they give you what they think and then you just ignore it, you tick them off. So if you've already made a decision about something and this is as a entry level leader, I mean, I had just started supervising a group and I found myself, I'd ask questions and be like, well, that's not, you know what, that's not what my boss wants us to do or that's not what I think I should do. So I learned, you know, ask for input when you really want input because if you get input and you ignore it, you don't, you know, build camaraderie with your team. So that would be one kind of just, whatever level of leadership you're at. But I would say the big strategic issues, we have a senior leadership team of 15 people. You know, I generally have a pretty strong opinion but I'm very much impacted by data and other people's points of view. So I wanna hear many different points of view and then, you know, we talk about it. If it's a really big decision, we're gonna spend a lot of time on it, you know, and look for the solution that we think optimizes across everyone's opinions. If we can't all agree, then it's my job as the leader to make a call. And there's times where I have to, you know, I ask, okay, I know we're not doing what you personally suggested, but I'm asking you to support this. And, you know, once we leave the room, it's not Mary's decision, it's our decision and we've all gotta do that. Some leaders have trouble with that and generally that, you know, causes issues. So, you know, that alignment, so, you know, I would like to make most decisions with a, you know, on these big, big strategic things to have a, you know, collaborate and have the right decision. But at the end of the day, once we make the call, and again, I know there's times where it's my job to make the call, but I wanna be informed by everybody's point of view because it's not like I'm all knowing. So that's the way I approach it. I think the second row also. Hello, my name is Madhav. I'm a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. I had a question. So I was wondering, there's a lot of public concerns with both EVs and AVs from like range anxiety and charger infrastructure to just general trust in autonomous vehicles. So how will GM sort of address those public concerns? Sure, well, I think, you know, having a robust charging infrastructure is gonna be very, very important for widespread adoption of EVs because it's a reality. You know, again, when we wanna get to 30, 40, 50% of the vehicles sold every year being electric vehicles, we are then reaching, you know, I'll say the majority of the workforce or the majority of the people who live in this country who only own one vehicle and they need that vehicle to work from every day. It's not today, it's the second or third or fourth or whoever knows what vehicle in their, you know, in their garage or, you know, stable of vehicles. And that's just because it's, you know, they're generally very expensive. But as we get to affordable EVs and we wanna get to levels that we really think we need to from an environmental perspective, we've gotta make sure we have a robust charging infrastructure. General Motors is working with a lot of startups. We're working with existing companies. We're also providing input to the government now that part of the infrastructure bill that was passed, the IIJA has provisions for charging infrastructure, as well as we're having conversations with the energy companies. Because there's many cases where there's enough, but if you think about it, we're only as good as the weakest link in the grid. We've proven that a couple of times in the last, you know, 20 years, just most recently, I think in Texas had, you know, energy grid issues. So those are challenges that have to come together to support widespread EV adoption. From an AV perspective, my biggest view on that, or my view on that, not my biggest view, my view is just get people to ride them. Because like I said, we had a great example of someone who rode in our autonomous vehicle and then had to take a lift to the airport, or maybe it was an Uber, I don't wanna pick on either one of the companies, but they were like, oh my God, the autonomous was such a better, less stressful ride. Because you think about it, you get into today's ride share with a driver, and it's only as good as the capability of that person's driving ability, and there's huge variation. So this is like a well-trained, paying attention, dutiful driver every time. So I really believe the way that autonomous vehicles will be adopted is people understanding that. And when you understand, you're an engineer, you said, right, software engineer? So if you have LiDAR, radar, and cameras, and all that sensor data is being fused together to tell that vehicle what to do, it's pretty powerful. That's always paying attention. Thank you. Eric, I'm an MBA and a Master's in Environment Sustainability and I have a question about how, as a leader, you approach the balance between business incentives and then community impact. And to give some color for that as an example, GM has had some really incredible, as you mentioned, dedication to an electric future, which is important for both air quality, which is great for communities and urban areas, as well as the climate. However, another large lever to accelerate that is, as Professor Greer mentioned, public transport, which sometimes auto manufacturers have been sort of antagonistic with because it can affect the bottom line, right? The more public transport slightly impacts the auto market. So when you see those, how do you balance the influence that a large company like GM has and you go forward in your decision making? I start with looking at what the customer wants. What's gonna be best for the customer? And if you can have what's best for the customer and also what's best for the community and what's best for the planet, I think that's where you win. I think anytime you try to, I always tell, because we have different constituencies in the company that will kind of like, oh, well, we don't wanna do that. Well, if that's the way the world's going, if we choose not to do it, someone else is gonna do it. So I think you have to really be customer driven, but then look for those solutions that intersect all three. And that's why I think there's gonna be a world where there's probably gonna be more shared autonomy, but there's also gonna be personal autonomy, but it's gonna be more optimized when you think about how we can use technology. So I think putting technology to the answer, you can delight the customer, make it better for them, more convenient, more personal, but also help communities get rid of congestion and have them be all electric or hydrogen fuel cell that helps deal with the environment. I think the more you can solve all three or all the different stakeholders at the same time, the more successful you're going to be. So I try to thread those needles. But it starts with the customer because the customer also, somebody might, I was in a conversation where somebody said, well, you should just get rid of personal vehicles and make everybody do public transport. It's unrealistic. People are, and it's not the, people, we saw it in the pandemic. People wanted to have their own space. They wanna be able to drive when they can drive or they wanna go when they wanna go, whether it's an autonomous vehicle or an electric vehicle or whatever. So if you don't start with what the customer really wants and what's gonna make their lives better, you're sub-optimizing. The front row. You guys hear me? Yes. Mary, I wanna thank you for your time. Marquise Smith, I'm a second year business school student here at Ross. Similar to you, my undergrad education was in engineering. And I'd love to get your perspective on this. I'm gonna make the assumption that when you were an engineer prior to becoming a senior leader at General Motors, you're more attuned to making decisions based off of quantitative data. I'd love to know how you became more comfortable making decisions in light of imperfect information. So I guess my question, as CEO of GM, how important is your gut or entering a meeting with a perspective when you need to make a call in light of that imperfect information? You know, I would find in most of the decisions that come my way, it's imperfect data. So I don't know if at the MBA program here, we had this class called Trees, but it was Decision Science Analysis. I'm assuming you have a class. No, you don't. Well, the funny thing. Yeah. I'm really old, so there's probably some better class. But we literally, in class, used to have to like, and the whole thing, it was to help you make decisions with imperfect data because it was like, okay, you have this situation. When are you gonna get more information? In some cases, so you could actually draw, what do I know now? And then assume you know, and you've laid it out. But what it kind of helped you think through is, you know, I'm never gonna have all of the information, but how do I know, is there information available that I can cut up? And the reason it was called Trees is you drew these crazy trees, decision trees. And you'd find yourself being able to cut up whole pieces of it because you, you know, you were analytical. This is why I'm confident you have a class like this. You're just using computers to do it. But the fact of having to draw it out, it really made you think, what information would I like? Am I ever gonna get it? If I'm gonna get it a little later and I don't need to make the decision now, I'll wait for the data. But what's the cost of waiting for that data because I could be late to market or, you know, it's never gonna come. And so that's the thought process you have to go through. But probably then one of the other things that really helped me in that is running HR. Because before that, I was always in engineering. So I was solving for apps, very quantitative. You get into HR and it's all about people. And people do crazy things. I can't tell you how many times people, I'd be like, they did what? And you're just like going, oh my gosh. And a lot of times in HR though, and not even because people do crazy things, but you find yourself in a situation where you're not making the best decision, you're making the least worst decision. And for those of you who attended Sherry's class, I'm sorry, this is repetitive. But I think that really helped me understand, you know, as you make decisions, sometimes you don't get to use data and sometimes you really are, you gotta take what you have in front of you, you gotta make the best decision you can. And sometimes you're making the least worst decision and it's hard. One last thing I would say is, look at the stakeholders involved. To evaluate a decision, for us, when we make a big decision, our employees are impacted, our dealers, our suppliers, our unions, our communities, and potentially our government. You can't always solve for all of those, but you should at least understand the impact you have on all those different stakeholders and try to mitigate it. Interesting. We actually, in our core management course, we have a little bit on decisions. I'm trying to backtrack a little bit now. But we do teach using a rubric, you know, of like how do you actually have a rubric to evaluate the hard choices. See, you've made it better. You have the class, don't worry. It's just required in the core now. 30 years, after 30 years, I know you have it and it's better. Well, it's interesting. I know the one that you took at Stanford of critical analytical thinking, CAT, was the most controversial course they're on off for the years because no one could agree about how to teach decisions. They couldn't make decisions about decisions. And so, it's interesting. It is a hard question. So, final student question of the day. Anybody really wanna have their hand high for this one? I see two hands in the back, you won. Thank you for the opportunity. So, hi, my name is Aditya. So, I'm a current master's supply chain management student here. So, I'm working on a project on the semiconductor chip shortage. So, I'm kind of intrigued and just wanted your opinion on what GM is doing in kind of alleviating the problem. And are there any like strategic steps that you are taking to kind of gain that visibility into your supply chain? Yes, so I would say we're doing something to solve the problem in the short term and then we're taking steps to solve it in a very different way in the mid to long term. In the short term, the issue that most OEMs face is we don't buy, like at General Motors, we buy very few semiconductors. Our tier one suppliers or tier two suppliers are the ones who buy the semiconductors and it comes to us in assembly. So, if you can imagine, if you're not buying them, the proliferation is huge. And so, and you're relying on, you say that the tier one, I need this many of them. The tier one says to the tier two, I need this many, who goes to the tier three. And by the time you get to the wafer, you're the tier five or tier six. All those people in that chain are making decisions. You know, at General Motors, we told everybody how many we needed. We, you know, our forecast was right. And so, the June of the year prior, because you know, the other thing is you've got to grow wafers. So, you know, you're always six months out. I know more about semiconductors. Even though I'm an electrical engineer, I know more about semiconductors than I really ever wanted to know. But, so what we're doing now is we're working with every member of that tiered base. So, we have a direct relationship so we can be talking to them to understand, everyone understands. Because one of the things we found is people were haircutting our forecast. And so, that didn't help. Because of COVID, I mean, it wasn't like, and people were trying to make their best decisions to manage their business because who knew how fast the industry for autos was going to recover. It just went from like, you know, virtually nothing to like, you know, pretty high level globally. So, that's what we're doing in the short term. And then, what that allows us to do is at a very, at the wafer level layer, we can actually level, we can actually say, you know what, repurpose that instead of, we want to be able to build these most in-demand vehicles. So, we're going to reallocate sometimes at the wafer level to get more of the chips we need. And that's how we're, you know, looking at it. Broader, we've announced that we're going to be much more directive in the semiconductors. We need three broad families and we're working strategically with a handful of semiconductor manufacturers and foundries to, so we have much more control over our destiny. We have better scale. We'll be able to integrate and take costs out. So, short term, long term. So, I want to wrap it up now. Final closing question. For all the aspiring leaders in the room, any closing words of advice you want to pass on for us for today? Well, I would say at every level, you know, first of all, as an individual contributor, but even no matter what job that you're doing, work really hard. Hard work beats talent if talent doesn't work hard. And so, you get noticed when you're, you know, you become the go-to person because you're working hard, you demonstrate results, people trust, they want you on your team. You want to be the person they want on their team when they're facing a difficult challenge. So, work hard. The second thing is care. Care about people. You know, as you want to inspire people to follow you, they have to know that you care about them. It doesn't always mean you can do the absolute thing they want you to do, but they have to know you care. They have to know you agonized over that tough decision you made. And that they know you're acting in the best interest, even if it's not in the best interest of the corporation and the employment of all, as maybe the other. The other thing I would say is find something you're passionate about, so work is much work. Work's still gonna be work. You know, there's parts of every job that, I remember my nephew one time, he was in an internship and he was in an assignment where he was doing, like, Excel spreadsheets all day. And he said, you know, this isn't that much fun. I go, yeah, that's why they call it work. I know, there's gonna be parts of your job that is work. But if you work hard and you care about people and you have passion in what you do and you recognize there's, you know, just sometimes you're just gonna have to, you know, just brute force and work through it, you'll do well and you'll do something that you're passionate about. And, you know, I'll just end by saying wherever role you play at the University of Michigan, you're at an incredible, incredible university. And you've been, you have the privilege of being a part of this school or attending this school. So with that privilege and that opportunity that you all have in front of you, there's just so many wonderful things about this institution. You have a responsibility to make sure, you know, you have an impact on the world, a positive impact, please, on the world. So, you know, take what you've had the opportunity by being a part of University of Michigan and have a tremendous positive impact on the world. So thank you all for your time and attention and thanks for all the wonderful questions and thank you, Lindy. Thank you, Mary. Thank you so much. We really appreciate the time in which you've spent with us today. We'd like to present you with a gift. Inside is a picture of a tree and it represents the Michigan Burr Oak that's right outside of our building and trees to us represent leadership. They represent power and change. And so in this bag is a picture of a tree that was handcrafted by one of a student artist. And so every leadership dialogue speaker that we bring, we will be curating a picture of a tree that represents the story that you can learn more about inside. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. Thank you. Please give one more round of applause to Mary. Thank you. A couple of quick reminders before we go. I wanna thank Professor Lindy Greer for her excellent moderation and for Mary for her wisdom. Thank you all so much. We also at the beginning, I didn't mention this, but it's really important. We envision a center that is a place when you think of leadership, you think of Michigan Ross. We envision a center that is a place where faculty and staff and students and alumni, corporate leaders are coming together to talk about leadership development. And that's exactly what we hope to do. We hope that this program and our center isn't the only time that you hope to engage. And so whether you are a staff member, a faculty member, a student, we hope you sign up for our newsletter, become involved in our center. We'll be having more ways for you to engage. We'll be following up with you all via email. I'd be remiss without saying that our next Leadership Dialogue speaker is gonna take place on June 23rd, moderated by Professor Andy Hoffman. We'll be bringing Paul Polman, a former CEO of Unilever. Please join us in June. And for now I wanna thank you all for your engagement, for your questions, and to thank you all, we've got a catered reception right outside these doors in the Stewart Lobby. Thank you all. Have a great night.