How GE teaches teams to lead change (General Electric’s Leadership, Innovation, and Growth (LIG) programme)

Citation

(2009), "How GE teaches teams to lead change (General Electric’s Leadership, Innovation, and Growth (LIG) programme)", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 23 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2009.08123cad.007

How GE teaches teams to lead change (General Electric’s Leadership, Innovation, and Growth (LIG) programme)

Article Type: Abstracts From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 23, Issue 3

Prokesch S. Harvard Business Review, January 2009, Vol. 87 No. 1, Start page: 99, No. of pages: 8

Purpose – Reports on how General Electric’s (GE) four-day Leadership, Innovation, and Growth (LIG) programme provided an effective approach to help businesses provide team training to help them through the process of change management. Design/methodology/approach – The LIG, held in October 2007 at GE’s management development centre in Crotonville, New York, brought together for the first time the senior managers of a business’s management team for training. Reports an assessment of the value of the LIG programme one year later in terms of its clear success in accelerating its push into emerging markets, initiatives launched to revamp product development, and increased efforts to create new businesses. Findings – The reasons why the LIG programme was so effective in helping to bring about these changes were due to: team training designed to accelerate the pace of change by giving managers an opportunity to reach consensus on the barriers to change and how best to attack them; encouragement to participants to consider both the hard and the soft barriers to change; look beyond providing new concepts that would make people look at their businesses and themselves differently; and ensuring that the programme was not an academic exercise but was structured so that a team would emerge with the first draft of an action plan for instituting change in its business and would feel obligated to deliver on it. Originality/value – Provides clear and practical evidence of the value of team training. ISSN: 0017-8012 Reference: 38AD102

Keywords: Change management, Electrical engineering, Manufacturing, Organizations, Senior management, Teamwork, Training, USA