Learn coaching leadership from Welch

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Editor's note: Excellent leaders have such a consensus: to be effective and competent, they must actively act to influence the environment around them and motivate their subordinates to play their role. potential. When a leader becomes a coach, he or she is able to identify a subordinate's motivating factors and find a unique way to communicate with the subordinate to help him succeed. That's how Jack Welch gradually transformed GE as a coaching leader to great effect.

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In the 1980s, General Electric was faced with the dilemma of shrinking business and an urgent need for organizational restructuring. Welch's drastic reforms brought about major changes in the company's appearance. In the 1990s, GE began to implement the cultural concepts of openness, openness, communication and sharing, and informal etiquette, advocated creative collision of ideas among employees, and implemented the company's personnel selection system. During this time, Welch focused his leadership function on talent issues, which became a critical phase of his career.

What people want to know is the results of Welch's overhaul of the company, which is routinely released on Wall Street. However, it is Welch's relentless pursuit of values and cultural ideals that is of most interest, both at GE and in the business world. We know that values and cultural ideas are often questioned, and their effects are difficult to quantify; however, it is the values and cultural ideas that Welch advocated that enabled him to attract, retain, nurture and motivate a batch of elite talents. His tremendous effort in this area has also established him as a leader to watch and emulate. While the business press pays close attention to real financial reports and hyped stock prices, including Welch himself, that doesn't fully explain the level of engagement with every Welch remark and opinion. interest.

Welch is determined to gain insight into the complexities of human behavior. Every time he tries, he will discover something, and after every discovery, he will share it with his subordinates and others. Welch's unwavering determination and extraordinary ability to connect with people is truly exciting and fascinating. He exemplifies what a successful leader should look like today and in the future. Such a leader will not be condescending and dictate work arrangements, nor will he have a cold face, and will allocate manpower and materials with a small abacus for personal gain in his heart—the image of a successful leader he presents is a teacher who is good at understanding And a coach who is good at inducing, is a super communication master.

"My greatest achievement is finding great people, and I've found a lot of them. They're better than most CEOs." Indeed, GE is proud to have a stable of Excellent leadership. Welch's claim that he "discovered" these leaders is true, but not entirely true. In fact, these leaders were also cultivated through his tireless efforts.

As GE CEO, Welch felt he should spend half his time on talent issues. He didn't complain when he reported this fact to everyone, on the contrary, he thought he was doing what he was supposed to do. "My job is to select people, evaluate people, give them confidence, develop them and transfer them a common philosophy," says Welch. One point he made repeatedly was that he was not managing the company, he was leading the company's development, and emphasized people-centred rather than management-centred leadership. A leader's primary responsibility is to teach, motivate, and inspire employees, while developing more leaders. At GE, the Brainstorming Program, Six Sigma, and meritocracy formed the three pillars of Jack Welch's cultural revolution. And a series of practices he advocates, such as being a coach and advisor to employees, sharing different information and perspectives, and making more people aware of his vision for the company's development, constitute the fourth pillar of cultural innovation.

Crotonville: Sharing Learning and Best Practices

The Washington Post called Crotonville "the most special and influential business school in the world." What people call Crotonville here is General Electric's Management Development Institute.

The college was founded in 1956 by then-chairman Ralph Cordina. The campus covers an area of 52 acres and is located in a place called "Croton on the Hudson" in the Hudson River Valley, commonly known as "Crotonville". The college can accommodate approximately 150 students in accommodation. The college is known for its no-holds-barred style of study, rustic rustic setting and semi-public atmosphere.

Jack Welch spent most of his teenage years in a place known as "The Big Pit" in Salem, Massachusetts. It was an abandoned gravel quarry where he and his mates used to play. After becoming GE's leader, he spent most of his time in the "big pit" of Crotonville. This is a lecture hall on the campus of the General Electric Management Development Institute. The hall is surrounded by bright colors. The speaker stands in front of the sunken podium in the center of the hall, and when he looks up, he can look around the audience.

Over the years, Welch has come to the Academy to teach an average of one class a month. Welch often comes here when students are finishing their three-week management and finance courses. By 1998, he had given about 250 classes and trained about 15,000 GE managers.

Welch declared, "I want to use the Crotonville campus and the opportunity for employees to learn and communicate here to drive a change in the company's corporate culture." Welch injected $45 million in funding shortly after taking office. Improve teaching conditions in Crotonville while cutting funding in other areas.

At first, Welch's classroom became a place for people to vent their emotions. When he looked up at the students around him, all he saw were angry faces. The Investor's Business Daily reported: "In the past, many workers had no right to express their opinions on company affairs at all, and they were like robots on the assembly line. But now, Welch told them that he They need their strength. Now, the resentment that the workers had suppressed for 20 years finally erupted, cursing and lashing out without any scruples.”

A reporter for Business Week once described Wei Wei Birch's lecture in Crotonville's "The Big Pit": "For nearly 4 hours, he was listening, speaking, eliciting, and asking questions. The listeners also responded one by one."

This The scene is very exciting. "In the eyes of the students who attended the lecture, Welch was a generalist - both a management theorist and a strategic thinker, a business coach and a role model for all the company's employees - despite his humble background, through unremitting efforts, he eventually became a Great tool. Everyone leaves the lecture hall inspired."

In Crotonville, students and lecturers (including Welch) can be completely free from rules and responsibilities by leaving their day-to-day work environment bondage. That doesn't mean, however, that they can talk about big things in general. In fact, Crotonville's teaching content has always been rooted in the current state of the company's business. "Crotonville has become a place for people to learn and share best practices from around the world," says Welch. This interactive place of teaching and learning combines people's thirst for knowledge with concrete practice.

Coaching: Talk, Repeat, Listen

Teaching Crotonville students is not only an important job, but a fun job, according to Welch. In Crotonville, he can have direct conversations with the company's future leaders, not only delivering his views to them, but also listening to them and learning from them. Welch also worked hard to spread the spirit of interaction and the good atmosphere of sharing information and opinions into the company's business management process.

For example, he said: "In the past, company meetings were filled with rhetoric and unrealistic reports; now, meetings have become an interactive forum for spreading new ideas and sharing good experiences."

Another important step in which Welch absorbed ideas and exchanged ideas was the establishment of a regular annual company meeting. The attendees were the company's 500 top executives. The location is usually set in the cities where the conference is most frequently held in the United States. At the meeting, managers presented their plans and opinions, and Welch sat in the front row and took a lot of notes.

Finally, the CEO took the stage to give a closing remarks, including some of his responses to the presentations from the attendees and some of his thoughts on the annual work schedule. By the time the attendees returned to their offices to resume work, Welch's speech had been translated into several languages, videotaped and distributed to institutions around the world.

GE is a company with a "learning atmosphere" where all employees, including Welch himself, are constantly learning and growing. Welch and some other company leaders had no knowledge of the Internet and computers. In the last few years of Welch's tenure, they realized the importance of this knowledge, so they were humble to the young generation X employees who were familiar with the Internet. Ask, Welch has benefited greatly from these young people who have been exposed to the Internet since childhood. Based on observations, former Citigroup chairman Walter Liston concluded that while CEOs think they are in charge, they are often the last to know important news about how the company is really doing. Welch has always kept that in mind. In order to prevent this from happening to himself, Welch has always placed great emphasis on communicating with employees in Crotonville and using other channels to obtain information.

President Eisenhower once compared leadership to the art of "getting others to do what you want them to do". BusinessWeek reported that in his first few years as CEO, Welch realized he had to learn the art of leadership. "He found that with good intentions and no effort, things will not happen naturally. Of course, if you just assume a high position and issue orders to hundreds of employees, the situation will not change substantially. Therefore, , he always stubbornly emphasized his ideas over and over again."

According to the Investor's Business Daily, "Welch spent years putting complex and intractable requirements. Distill into sound principles that people can accept." As a person who specializes in communicating with people, I think there are few people who can compare with him in the art of communication, and very few can argue like him. Powerful and able to express ideas and principles in fresh, interesting and thought-provoking ways. As we all know, many professionals in business, politics, media, and other industries look forward to seeing Welch's letters to shareholders every year, poring over their thrust and conveying their spirit to a wider context. . At the end of the day, they do it because Welch's ideas are clear and his expressions are concise and classic. In fact, when Welch himself made these interesting and inspiring views. It did not add any deliberate embellishments and embellishments, but as a result, greatly increased the credibility and persuasiveness of the point of view itself.

"Any successful leader, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Reagan, first described to people how to do things better, then gave them a clear vision that motivated them to move forward, Welch said, "On the contrary, some of our managers are not like that. They often needlessly complicate and detail things, which only makes the situation worse. In their minds, management is equivalent to Sophisticated, you have to make yourself appear smarter than others, but such managers don’t inspire anyone.”

Welch’s approach is to first express his vision of the future succinctly, and then promote it among employees Start with the premise that the idea is what people are interested in, and then let go and let the employees gradually realize the idea. In fact, all of this has long been more than just a communication style. It has become Welch's unique management principle: "We are not trying to manage better, but to manage less, and the effect will be better."

Leaders create leaders

In a 1997 letter to shareholders, Jack Welch wrote, "Indeed, the best leaders are those who work like coaches." Edison Electric Power Institute Dean Tom Kuhn has observed Welch's "coaching skills" on numerous occasions. He told me, "Jack has an extraordinary skill for dealing with people, and he has a very good sense of human intuition, and I think that's what makes him so special."

Welch was often proud that he The leaders developed have achieved brilliant achievements at GM, and even if some executives were later poached by other companies, they also created good results for their companies. Welch's rigorous, long-term plan for cultivating and selecting successors is a testament to his full emphasis on talent: to inspire, train, and create creative and productive management talent.

Canada's National Post analyzes Welch's leadership. "Welch's most important job is to develop future managers of General Electric," the paper said. "To achieve this goal, he spent more time at Crotonville than actually running the company."

Welch very much wanted the rest of the company's executives to answer his call, both for themselves and for the company's success. He said that the most important ability for future leaders to have is to "stimulate the vitality of the company, urge the company to pay attention to the external environment, get rid of the tendency to be self-sufficient, encourage every employee to perform their duties and resist the exaggeration, and minimize the level of management. Only in this way, the whole Employees of the company can freely share all information.”

By persistently implementing and refining a series of programs, methods, and rewards and punishments, Welch sought to shatter the bastions of bureaucracy within the company. He advocated employees to learn knowledge, encouraged them to exercise power, and replaced the original cultural atmosphere in which senior leaders had absolute authority and gave orders with this new cultural concept. This approach attracts elite talent to general-purpose work, which increases productivity, unleashes creativity, and enables profitable growth for the company. Welch believes that if anyone doesn't understand why GM has become such a large multinational company, he need only look at the company's talent pool to answer:

"Our real 'core strength' is not in production or service. Our 'core strength' is the ability to recruit and cultivate talents on a global scale, and give them the desire to continuously learn, develop and progress."

This article is excerpted from CITIC Publishing House in 2004 with permission The book "The Art of Welch's Leadership" by James W. Robinson was translated and published in May.