Mary Barra, GM’s first female chief product officer, is responsible for the design and quality of all GM cars and trucks. Barra, 51, comes across as measured and standard-issue corporate, the opposite of swaggering. Rather than brag about the awesome torque of the new Corvette, she talks about “driving an organization that’s customer focused.”
“Mary Barra has probably the hardest job in the global auto industry right now,” says Morgan Stanley’s Jonas. “If she can really knock the cover off the ball, she deserves to be CEO of GM.”
Her big break came when GM put her in a program for high-potential workers and gave her a scholarship to get an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She became an executive assistant for then-CEO Jack Smith, a perch that gave her a window into how the company worked.
Barra’s most high-profile moment came in 2009 after then-CEO Fritz Henderson put her in the HR role to help groom a new generation of leaders as the company worked to come out of bankruptcy. She allowed employees to wear jeans. “Our dress code policy is ‘dress appropriately,’ ” she announced in a memo. Barra had been attacking GM’s bureaucracy, slashing the number of required HR reports by 90 percent and shrinking the company’s employee policy manual by 80 percent. But loosening the dress code drew a flood of calls and e-mails from employees asking if they could, in fact, wear jeans. One manager was upset about the image this might send to company visitors. “So you’re telling me I can trust you to give you a company car and to have you responsible for tens of millions of dollars,” Barra responded, “but I can’t trust you to dress appropriately?”
It wasn’t a fashion issue. Barra saw the dress code, along with other changes, as an opportunity to have a conversation about responsibility. “There was a culture in the past where the rule was the rule and when you weren’t empowered to make the decision you could all just complain about the rule. Well, now we were really empowering virtually every single person,” Barra says. “We had a lot of HR for HR.”
That’s about as negative as Barra will go. She won’t be goaded into criticizing her colleagues and refuses to take shots at former executives. She stays on message: Her job is to make cars and trucks people want to buy, and to do so efficiently.
GM now has five female plant managers in North America. Four of its 14 board members are women, as are four of its 18 officers. “I’m not blind to the fact that sometimes it’s probably helped” being a woman in the car industry, Barra says. “Sometimes it’s probably hurt.”
Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 17, 2013
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