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Running head: MARY BARRA’S JOURNEY TO TRANSFORM GENERAL MOTORS
THROUGH INTENTIONAL CHANGE MODEL
1
Mary Barra’s Journey to Transform General Motors Through Intentional Change Model
Ghadeer Odeh, MBA
The George Washington University
School of Business
Running head: MARY BARRA’S JOURNEY TO TRANSFORM GENERAL MOTORS
THROUGH INTENTIONAL CHANGE MODEL
2
Abstract
Since Mary Barra was appointed as the Chief Executive Officer at General Motors to be
the first female CEO leading in the auto industry, speculations emerged on how effectively she
transformed General Motors and sustained its competitive advantage. She didn’t only overcome
crises but took General Motors to new heights leading the climate change transformation through
her visionary leadership. The paper will examine Mary’s journey to transform GM through the
lens of the intentional change leadership model, which resulted in her self-renewal as a leader,
revamping GM’s vision, and core values to sustain its competitive advantage and increase
workforce efficiency.
Introduction
Mary Barra is the first female CEO in a male-dominated auto industry. During her tenure
at General Motors (GM) since 1980, she rotated as a vice president in different departments
encompassing: human resources, engineering, and global supply chain until she became the
Chief Executive Officer at GM in 2014. Her rotation assisted her in understanding GM's business
needs and the auto market trends to make the right decisions and lead with resilience through
crises. The paper will illustrate the outcomes that emerged from her intentional change
experience to renew herself as a leader, redefine GM's vision, and the implications on workforce
performance, leading through crises and decision-making effectiveness to transform GM.
Keywords: Transformational Leadership, Situational Leadership, Richard Boyatzis International
Change Model, Participatory Leadership, Resilience, Managing High-Performance Teams,
Diversity & Inclusion, Culture & Innovation, Decision Making.
Running head: MARY BARRA’S JOURNEY TO TRANSFORM GENERAL MOTORS
THROUGH INTENTIONAL CHANGE MODEL
3
The Intentional Change Journey: The intentional change model developed by Richard
Boyatzis identified five dimensions for leaders to reach intentional change successfully. leaders
must be self-aware of their strengths and weaknesses and the ideal self-image they desire. The
model also emphasized the significance of creating a learning agenda to capitalize on strengths
and assess weaknesses to draw lessons for future success. To instill new habits and sustain
change, leaders must reinforce strengths and positive experiences to lead the process for renewal.
Additionally, maintaining resonant relationships during the transformation can increase
resilience and empower leaders to sustain change. (Boyatzis & Mckee, 2007).
Self-Renewal: Mary reidentified GM's organizational goal from being the largest to the
best car maker in the market. Also, she determined her leadership core values to focus on
integrity, excellence, customer satisfaction, sociability, and understanding the auto business. She
rotated in various executive roles at GM as a vice president in the department of global
development, department of engineering, and vehicle manufacturing and the engineering
department until she became the CEO of GM. The rotation experience assisted her to understand
the business needs and how to allocate resources efficiently to reach business indicators and
identify the business measures of success. To capitalize on her progressive experience, she
created a learning journal to record success and failure in her journey and use the learned lessons
to make a holistic transformation in GM.
The Visionary Leader: Mary transformed the GM vision to imagine a world with zero
crashes, to save lives and zero emissions so future generations can inherit a healthier planet
(Jiang, 2022). The climate change resolution aims to protect the environment and position GM
for sustainable competitive advantage. Mary announced that GM will be using 100% renewable
energy for car production by 2035. (Cooper, 2021). She showed readiness to embark on the
Running head: MARY BARRA’S JOURNEY TO TRANSFORM GENERAL MOTORS
THROUGH INTENTIONAL CHANGE MODEL
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renewable car manufacturing process, revealing the key technologies to be used without
disclosing details to keep the competitive advantage of GM. (Jiang, 2022). Furthermore, she
encouraged women to study STEM to participate in the workforce needed in the renewable car
industry. (Delta, 2021).
Managing High-Performance Teams: Talent management is considered an integral
part of GM transformation, where Mary unleashed new workforce values for GM to include
diversity and inclusion, empowerment, motivation, and relationship management. (Rosen, 2014).
She correlated team goals to organizational goals to create meaning and purpose. (Chen, 2019).
The adopted values increased her team's capability to be creative and boosted her problem-
solving skills and productivity as a result.
The self-determination theory identified relatedness, competence, and autonomy factors
to increase motivation. (Katzenbach &Smith, 2020). Furthermore, involving employees in
decision-making in topics related to their area of responsibility, recognizing employees for their
unique contributions, and assigning them goals to demonstrate their competencies are crucial to
increase motivation. Employees' well-being is critical to foster productivity, where employees
feel accountable and respected, and operate in a psychological-safe workspace to address issues
that influence their productivity. Mary commissioned an Inclusion Advisory Board of internal
and external leaders in 2020 to promote diversity and inclusion. (Jiang, 2022). Adopting DEI
created a healthy workplace, and fostered creativity, productivity, and healthy competition
among employees. In addition, she indicated the importance of understanding employees’
behavior according to cultural norms to facilitate communication and lessen conflicts caused by
diversity.
Running head: MARY BARRA’S JOURNEY TO TRANSFORM GENERAL MOTORS
THROUGH INTENTIONAL CHANGE MODEL
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In her first days as a CEO, she prioritized understanding the minds, emotions, fears, and
aspirations of GM employees. (Chen, 2019) to form a resonant relationship with her team,
support the implementation of the new vision of GM, and help her to overcome setbacks and
make informed decisions. Positive relationships during transformation are critical to increasing
compassion and helping to overcome failures. On the personal level, positive relationships
increase individual well-being, confidence, and resilience. The leader-member exchange
relationship should be positive to enable leaders to transform organizational values, and
experiences and communicate the new vision to team members smoothly. (Odeh & Ralon
&Rothenberg & Turney &Wu, 2021).
Decision Making: Mary embraced the participatory leadership style, where GM
employees participate in the decision-making process making them feel accountable for GM's
growth. Besides that, she adopted a collaborative approach and engaged employees in the
decision-making process. (Jiang, 2022), however, if the consensus approach doesn’t seem
sufficient to make the right decision, Mary will take the consultative approach and leadership in
the decision-making process. I believe that the consensus approach increases the probability of
making the right decision if the involved employees are highly qualified in specific areas.
Leading Through Crises: In 2014, GM recalled nearly 2.6 million cars due to defects
that caused the death of 13 people and caused 32 crashes. (Jiang,2022). To resolve the conflict
with customers and retain GM's reputation, Mary took the collaboration approach, she
assertively fixed the relationships with customers, provided compensation, and created a learning
journal to address lessons from the incident for the future to ensure not to happen again. When
asked about her profound advice, Mary stated “Be conscious of how you make the other person
feel. Assume the goodness of others. Did we show that person they are important?”
Running head: MARY BARRA’S JOURNEY TO TRANSFORM GENERAL MOTORS
THROUGH INTENTIONAL CHANGE MODEL
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Situational leadership: Is defined as the situation when the leader is required to act on multiple
leadership situations to meet the business need, which requires leaders to be highly adaptative
and responsive to change. The top strategies worked during crises are adaptation, structural
interventions, managerial interventions, and exit strategies. (Brett & Behfar, & Kern, 2006).
Mary followed the exit strategy to cut 14.800 jobs in response to the recession and ignored
President Trump's request to open a new plant quickly and increase car production. During that
time of recession, she proved to be resilient, she made structural interventions and directed GM's
efforts to increase the production of SUVs and trucks since they are in top demand, Additionally,
she allocated more resources to start producing electric cars to stay abreast of rival companies.
Her decision showed strong resilience to cope with the recession by slumping production for
three years and shifting to start producing driverless cars to gain a market positioning. (Buss,
2015).
To make a real and transformative change, leaders should make a holistic change to
include self-intentional change, team, culture, and system alignment, also leaders must design a
vision and core values to ensure long-term sustainability based on the market landscape analysis
and dynamics. (Odeh, 2021).
Running head: MARY BARRA’S JOURNEY TO TRANSFORM GENERAL MOTORS
THROUGH INTENTIONAL CHANGE MODEL
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Conclusion
Mary Barr is one of the top influential women to lead General Motors, a male-dominant
car industry. She successfully transformed GM's vision. Aligned her vision with the workforce
capacity and the organizational resources to create a long-term growth strategy. Her strategy for
GM is responsive to the auto industry trends and common problems like the climate change
dilemma, this enabled GM to stay on the competitive edge of the global transformation. She
capitalized on the values she embraced such as integrity, determination, adaptation, and
relationship management to gain customers’ trust and win the hearts and minds of her teams.
Although Mary set a workforce plan to know her team’s competencies and personalities and
designed the job structures to employ talents in the right fit. However, I think she missed creating
a reward and promotion system to recognize the best performers and foster innovation efforts.
Team diversification is critical to increasing innovation and problem-solving capabilities. but I
believe that she should conduct an annual skill competency evaluation of her diverse teams at
GM to design an effective job structure that employs these skills to increase innovation and help
talents overcome complacency resulting from increased cohesiveness and inclusion. Eventually,
I believe Mary is a visionary leader who will continue to strive and take GM to new heights in
the long run through her participatory leadership, she will envision the best ideas and innovate
new solutions. Furthermore, I suggest she create a monetization strategy in line with GM's vision
to gain market advantage and capture multiple impacts.
Running head: MARY BARRA’S JOURNEY TO TRANSFORM GENERAL MOTORS
THROUGH INTENTIONAL CHANGE MODEL
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References
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Brett, J & Behfar, K & Kern, M. (2006). Managing Multicultural Teams. Harvard Business
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Buss, D. (2015). GM CEO Barra’s Streamlining Plan Underscores Her Trailblazer Status In Auto
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Chen, R. (2018). 8 Insights on Leadership from GM CEO Mary Barra and the Wharton People
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Odeh, G & Ralon, A &Rothenberg, J & Turney, M &Wu,Y. (2021). How Followers Contribute
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