Column: GM's ‘chief diversity officer' (the CEO) cultivates goodness

Mary Barra is navigating the giant General Motors ship though some rocky waters, and she needs everyone rowing in the same direction.

At the same time, some employees felt tossed about as the company told them they could make their own decisions about where to work, then told them to come to the office — then relented but also set a new date early next year for planning to return about half of the time.

While the process has been more turbulent than optimal, the CEO is trying to meet her employees in the middle, where the company and its workers can get what they need.

In a town hall after the back-to-offfice announcement, she said she asked everyone: "Please, assume goodness."

It's the right ask, though not an easy one. GM is a big institution, and it's easy for people to feel left out or that they are seen as cogs in a giant machine that doesn't necessarily care about them as humans.

Barra wants workers, like basically everyone in this late-pandemic period, to take a moment to reconsider how best they should work — individually, as a team and as a massive global organization.

"Think about a vehicle," Barra said this month at a year-end fireside chat with the Automotive Press Association in Detroit. "It's an integration of about 30,000 parts. You can't do that over Zoom."

No doubt.

Ever since the spring 2020 lockdowns ended, GM's factory workers have been back in person, following safety protocols and getting the job done responsibly.

So have clay-model sculptors, factory managers and office workers who just prefer the tools and space of the workplace to working from home.

Part of that experience is spending time with peers and managers. Like other companies, GM has hired a lot of new people, many of whom know little about their colleagues. And they're unlikely to become part of a tight-knit unit or feel fully connected to the larger organization if they only work from home in a Detroit suburb or a remote mountain escape.

"I'm really proud about our culture, and I think it's a differentiator," Barra said. "But a culture needs to be nourished. You can't take a culture for granted."

As a second-generation GM lifer, Barra knows the benefits of the best of GM's culture: engineering excellence, efficiency, world-shaping ambitions.

But there have been blind spots in the GM culture, too. She took the reins at a time when the automaker was untangling a deadly ignition switch defect that had not been properly addressed as people wrapped up meetings with what was called a "GM nod" that would indicate cooperation but lack accountability.

And like much of corporate America, GM's leadership ranks didn't used to be a very diverse group. Even now, Barra is one of only three women among the company's 17 corporate officers. The board of directors, however, has been pretty evenly split for several years now, currently sitting at six women and seven men.

An engineer by training, Barra also worked for a time as head of human resources at GM, a deceptively powerful position. Even now as the only woman to lead a global automaker, she considers herself GM's chief diversity officer.

When Barra meets with employees, she said, she often asks them if they've ever felt excluded. In her 40 or so years at GM, she says she's had that experience, and it "feels really horrible."

So she reminds them: "If we all work to never make someone feel like they're not valued or they're excluded, or they don't belong, we're going to be going a long way to having a culture where people everybody feels included.

"I think when you feel included, you'll voice great ideas, you'll do your best work."

And it isn't all that different for union members, though of course some of the mechanisms differ.

Such as the contract negotiations next year that will set the standards for tens of thousands of members of the UAW and Unifor who work for GM — under more or less the same pattern as those at Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis.

Barra has had many family members in the industry and can empathize with the desire for job security, fair pay relative to inflation, safety and career development.

It was a friendly conversation at the APA event, but this did not seem like a CEO who went into the pandemic short on supply because of a 40-day strike in 2019. More like someone who can understand what life is like on the other side of the table.

"I always say my teeth are straight because my dad worked for General Motors."