Case: Ge’s Talent Machine: The Making of a Ceo

...

Moreover, internal job rotation can also be use on offer those “middle 70%” another chance to make their way up to the top 20%. Besides, GE should establish variety of opportunities and channels for these employees to improve themselves including language lessons, professional courses, etc. With these additional efforts from GE, even if these employees fail to make their way out of the middle 70%, they would still feel being valued by GE.

Issue Two

The process to score and hire MBA candidates and International recruiment shouldn’t be using the same criteria. A successful business shall not hire just MBA or just International Recruitment, but a good mix of both because they both have their strengths and weaknesses. As the business develops, a large portion of GE’s revenue is actually from overseas sales; therefore, the demand to recruit people that are local to the markets has risen.

Possible Solution

GE shall further design programs to develop their employees in long-term planning, rather than training and shaping them into so-called classic GE manager material. It would would a plus to GE image if the company can create a reputation for developing loyal, enthusiastic, educated and qualified candidates that would want to dedicate and devote their time and effort to GE as they are currently suffering from the fact that “GE did not yet have the reputation to make it the employer of choice internationally” (13).

Issue Three

As the company further expand their business blueprint crossing continents and borders, it is vital for GE to acknowledge and use the existence of hierarchies to their maximum advantage.

Possible Solution

To begin with, GE should consider to either get rid of the executive bands or weaken their power to control over the globe. For instance, GE should be more flexible in the ways they motivate their employees as cultural differences come into role, incentives and satisfactions are dramatically different. Some may value a promotion over monetary reward, while the others may think that monetary rewards are more practical. Therefore, GE should consider using rewards that fits and reflects the values and cultures of the locations the employee operate. By establishing customized reward systems, GE can not only ensure an increase in employee loyalty, but they’d possibly still see a growth in sales figure as employees may be even more motivated to invest in their time and effort.

[pic 4]

4. What lessons do you take from this case? Reflecting on your analysis – positive or negative – of GE’s development of its management pipeline, what do you see as the key success factors in making talent management what Immelt claims is an important source of competitive advantage for the company?

- They have a more complete training system:

Decentralization of responsibility and authority for making business decisions to the managers of 100 department- level businesses, that each acted as mini-companies. Giving higher responsibilities and authorities to different people instead of having just one big decision maker.

- Challenging managers to be active in different fields, giving them a broader field of experience and in the meanwhile also keeping them interested in the work(challenge).

- Constant evaluation - making the employees and managers alert and aware of their performance

- Dividing rewards according to contribution

- The side effect of meritocracy:

The establishment of meritocracy has significantly boosted GE’s overall performance until Welch changed the system so that people would strive to reach the top 20%. Aiming to rise to the top 20% may not be a bad thing in short term, but as time goes by, people may just stop trying and give up because employees may feel that there is no way that they’d be able to break into the top 20%. With the same amount of effort and time invested, they may just choose to go to another company and strive for better accomplishment.