As a new CEO with just a few weeks behind her, Mary Barra might offer the fresh leadership needed to solve General Motors’ recall crisis, but since she began her ascendance to the CEO’s office as a twenty year old intern, her lifer status raises red flags about her ability to evoke change in the company she now leads.
Surely Barra is a product of the GM Way. This presents a potential problem, because, clearly, something at GM has to change. And if GM has to change, Barra has to change first.
Many leaders view change as something that they do to others, but an important leadership moment occurs when a leader must acknowledge that he or she is part of the problem. And being part of the problem can be as subtle as a sly wink signaling agreement that a secret ought to be made of a serious issue.
It is not easy to accept the possibility that some of our most cherished and entrenched beliefs about how the world works, or about our company’s recipe for success, may be wrong. However, genuine transformation and the ability to continually learn and adapt (and deal with a crisis) only comes when people open themselves up to the possibility that they themselves will need to alter their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
That kind of learning occurs when we can recognize the mental model we are using and challenge its validity, and when we can see the walls of whatever box we happen to be in at the time for what it is, an artificial boundary to our thinking. ”Thinking outside the box” is actually not possible for a human being. You can think inside a different box or a bigger box, but there’s always a box, and its walls represent the limits of the mental model – the “way” – that you use to make sense of a given situation.
It has been suggested that GM’s predicament offers Mary Barra a unique opportunity to evaluate her management team. It is also a unique opportunity to evaluate herself, and especially to examine how she has been, and maybe continues to be, part of whatever aspect of the GM way that spawned the current crisis. If she cannot or does not do that necessary work, there is little chance of her effecting the kind of change needed at GM in order to manage the current crisis and avoid others in the future.
