In this episode
Manika Gupta has led change at GE for a decade, through divestitures, a breakup, and a new way of running the business, and she still relearns how hard it is every week.
She joins Aaron Lee to talk about the early-career program that rotated her every four months, what she learned from hearing the same feedback from five people at once, and the plain problem statement GE Aerospace now starts with.
Show outline
- 02:09 – Inside GE’s Corporate Audit Staff program
- 06:27 – What you do with the feedback
- 09:28 – How GE changed the way it changes
- 13:09 – Trust, simplicity, and brilliant at basics
- 14:55 – The lesson she wishes she’d learned sooner
Takeaways
- 1Change is hard because habits are. Data and plans are the easy part, so design for the habit you need people to build.
- 2Hearing the same feedback from several people turns it into perception. Gather input from peers, team, and stakeholders, with specific examples, before the conversation.
- 3Pace matters. Daily feedback can overwhelm; the annual review should have no surprises. Aim between the two.
- 4Name a problem in one line: the target, the actual, and the gap. Then find the few causes behind most of the gap. Once the problem is clear, the solving goes faster.
- 5Go where the work is done. Leaders learn more on the shop floor than in the deck.
- 6People are the gold mine. Keep building relationships and your network on purpose, every week.
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