How GE Teaches Teams to Lead Change

In 2006, General Electric launched its Leadership, Innovation, and Growth (LIG) program to support CEO Jeffrey Immelt's priority of achieving corporate growth primarily by expanding businesses and creating new ones. LIG represented a radical approach for GE's famed management development center in Crotonville, New York, because it was the first effort to train all the senior members of a GE business's management team as a group. Prokesch went through LIG with 19 senior managers of GE Power Generation, one of the company's oldest businesses, in October 2007. About a year later he revisited the "turbine heads," as Immelt affectionately calls them, to see how much impact the program had made. The answer was a lot. Team training accelerated the pace of change by giving managers an opportunity to reach consensus on the barriers they faced and how to overcome them. LIG participants were encouraged to consider both hard (organizational) and soft (behavioral) barriers. The training explicitly addressed how to balance the short term and the long term. The program created a common vocabulary of change - actual words that are used daily inside and across GE's businesses. And LIG was not an academic exercise: It was structured so that a team would emerge with the first draft of an action plan for instituting change. The author's firsthand experience in the four-day program, together with his follow-up interviews with GE executives, illuminates the effectiveness of this training approach. Power Generation's managers created a now ubiquitous vision statement, beefed up the leadership in their core business, expanded regulatory staff and project teams in emerging markets, revamped product development, put up a website where any employee can submit ideas for growth, and created a growth board to consider proposals and track their progress.

• Management development
• Teams
• Change management
• Growth strategy
• Fostering collaboration