Mary Barra started working at General Motors when she was a teenage intern in 1980. She started on the factory floor as an inspector. She held many jobs across GM, including executive assistant, head of internal communications, executive director of North American vehicle operations, VP of Global HRM, Senior VP for Global Product Development, and finally,in 2014 CEO.

When she took over as CEO at General Motors, Mary Barra surprised people when she began the process of transforming GM not by starting at the top and developing a new strategic plan per se. Rather, she focused on foundational issues designed to help transform GM's culture. She focused on simple but important changes such as the company's dress policy. As you learned in this chapter, organizational culture is made up of rituals, stories, and routines. It is something you can "feel" within an organization. Some scholars refer to it as a company's "secret sauce." Part of any new employee's adjustment process includes learning their new organization's culture. However, culture change is especially challenging. How people dress is an important signal to an organization's culture.

After Barra changed the dress code to two simple words (which were "Dress Appropriately"), she had to problem-solve with leaders throughout the organization. As she asked herself, "if they cannot handle 'dress appropriately,' what other decision can't they handle? And I realized that often, if you have a lot of overly prescriptive policies and procedures, people will live down to them." Thus, her focus on simplifying the dress code helped her see where the resistance to doing things in a new way might come from and how to overcome such concerns when it came to bigger decisions such as which parts of the business to retain or sell off.

Her philosophy is that everyone is better off if they stop making assumptions about what other people want or need. She also asked GM employees to try new things. For example, to encourage teams at GM to work together, she asked 250 engineers and designers to participate in a paper sailboat race. As John Calabrese, GM's VP of Global Engineering puts it, "She wanted them to have fun at a highly stressful time, but also encourage teamwork and collaboration." She made other changes in the culture as evidenced by the phrases heard at GM. The idea of "customer first" is not unique for a company such as Amazon but for GM, it was something new. She has also put data from customers at the center of product development as well as manufacturing decisions.

QUESTION

Is having a very simple, two-word dress code empowering or ambiguous, or both? What do you see as the reasons for your response?