If you were to look up the term Silent Problem, the iconic symbol for GM would be there. Over the past 30+ years, GM has been a company where culture trumped everything. Well last week, GM finally took a couple baby steps to shake up the team, and hopefully begin to change the culture. A report over at Bloomberg titled, Whitacre’s GM Culture Fix Moves Up Younger Executives, Women provides a few insights from various analysts and consultants. Here they are:
- “It’s a signal they are serious about getting younger people in and running the place right,” said Thomas Stallkamp, 63, industrial partner at buyout firm Ripplewood Holdings LLC and a member of the team that helped restructure Chrysler Corp. in the 1990s. “This is a culture that was so inbred, so genteel, people were afraid to speak up.”
- “Most of what has occurred this week at General Motors is about speeding things up and making people more accountable for the decisions they make,” John Wolkonowicz, an analyst at consultant IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.”
- “Almost by definition, any change is probably good for the company because GM has resisted change so heavily in the past,” said John Casesa, managing partner of consultant Casesa Shapiro Group LLC in New York. “GM’s resistance to change is one of the key reasons for its decline.”
- “The speed these changes were made with shows this is not the lumbering GM we’ve known in the past,” Michelle Krebs, senior analyst at Santa Monica, California-based researcher Edmunds.com, said in a telephone interview. “It shows that they’re truly trying to transform the company.”
In my book Without Warning, I include a list of seven warning signs that a silent problem is present. Guess what? GM has been continuously inflicted with all seven warning signs. GMs been a place where silence was practiced and Without Warning Events occurred with predictable regularity. The first step for GM in changing the culture is stupidly simple.
Give every employee a voice!
And then listen. Only then can an organization like GM create and sustain an environement for change.
Bottom Line: GM is an excellent example of what happens when silent problems go unresolved and begin to take over the organization. In a previous blog pose titled “Do Silent Problems Impact Business Performance” I illustrate how silent problems have a direct correlation to business performance.
