Feb 15, 2017 · Running Head: Case in Point: General Electric Allows Teamwork to Take Flight What do you think brought individuals at GE together to work as a cohesive team? General Electronics (GEs) management believe in its team capability and they think work results would be good if there is good team that involved to enhance productivity. GE's CEO Jack Welch who …
Answer the following question: What do you think brought individuals at GE together to work as a cohesive team? As I would see it, what united GE to work as a cohesive team began with Robert Henderson. Henderson realized he had an objective for the General Electric Company's new task that they were going to set out on.
What do you think brought individuals at GE together to work as a cohesive team? 3. In the case of GE, do you view the team members or the management leaders as the most important part of the story? 4. How do you think Henderson held his team members accountable for their actions? 5.
Dec 01, 2016 · 2. What do you think brought individuals at GE together to work as a cohesive team? I think that since the employees that were chosen were hand-picked because they had FAA mechanic’s licenses, they were able to form a bond since they were pretty much equally qualified for the job. Find answer below 1.
Factory floors, traditionally, are unempowered workplaces where workers are more like cogs in a vast machine than self-determining team members. In the name of teamwork and profitability, Henderson traveled to other factories looking for places where worker autonomy was high. He implemented his favorite ideas at the factory at Durham.
GE hadn’t designed a jet engine from the ground up for over 2 decades. Developing the jet engine project had already cost GE $1.5 billion. That was a huge sum of money to invest—and an unacceptable sum to lose should things go wrong in the manufacturing stage.
In Durham, North Carolina, Robert Henderson was opening a factory for General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). The goal of the factory was to manufacture the largest commercial jet engine in the world. Henderson’s opportunity was great and so were his challenges. GE hadn’t designed a jet engine from the ground up for over 2 decades.
The answer, Henderson decided, was that one person couldn’t fulfill the mission. Even Jack Welch, GE’s CEO at the time, said, “We now know where productivity comes from. It comes from challenged, empowered, excited, rewarded teams of people.”. Empowering factory workers to contribute to GE’s success sounded great in theory.
GE’s bottom line showed the benefits of teamwork, too. From the early 1980s, when Welch became CEO, until 2000, when he retired, GE generated more wealth than any organization in the history of the world.
Plant manager Jack Fish described Henderson’s radical factory, saying Henderson “didn’t want to see supervisors, he didn’t want to see forklifts running all over the place, he didn’t even want it to look traditional. There’s clutter in most plants, racks of parts and so on. He didn’t want that.”.
The final LIG session involved the reports to Immelt. Power Gen was the first up of the six business teams. Led by Bolze, its members talked about their biggest takeaways from the program, their 10-year projection of revenues (from $13 billion to $40 billion, with renewables’ share going from 30% to 50%), and a vision statement—“Powering the world responsibly”—that they hoped would inspire and galvanize their 10,000 employees by dedicating the business to being more global, lighting up dark places in the world, and being sensitive to the environment.
The aim of the LIG program at General Electric was “to embed growth into the DNA of our company.”. The reality, I learned, was that headquarters was the main force behind GE’s successes. Immelt understood that to speed progress, he needed to pass the baton to the teams leading GE’s businesses—which is where LIG came in.
Its annual revenues soared from $800 million at the time it was purchased to $4.7 billion in 2007 (and were expected to reach $6.8 billion in 2008).
A large amount of time—about 15 to 20 hours —was set aside for these breakouts. On day four the course wrapped up with a plenary session at which each team had about 20 minutes to deliver a presentation to Immelt.
LIG’s team-based approach addresses shortcomings inherent in the individual-focused approach used by traditional management education programs. Although GE’s annual HR process helps individuals identify growth values in need of improvement and prescribes training, it fails to recognize the fact that the other members of their teams might have differing notions. For example, someone who needs to become more inclusive might be on a team that doesn’t highly value a collegial style or isn’t interested in sharing information broadly. In that environment the individual might find it difficult to change his or her ways.
Reprint: R0901J 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.
Henson, then the company’s chief marketing officer and now the president of GE Capital Solutions, LIG began in September 2006 and ended in September 2008. (A follow-up program, to be launched in 2009, is in the works.)