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Traditional Culture - Has not changed

Dev/QA Test
Current Employee
Has worked at General Motors for 6 years
May 3, 2019
Roswell, Georgia
3.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

Vacation (time off gets to 4 weeks in 3 years)

Pay seems to be equal or slightly higher.

Big Name Company.

If you are really into cars?

Cons

Traditional, paternalistic, confused, top-down leadership.

Very difficult to grow professionally (incestuous focus on internal learning, no focus on benchmarking).

Micromanagement is pretty common here.

Leadership pays lip service but does not listen to anything. Just learn to nod your head and say yes.

Layoffs/restructuring (which is the same as layoffs, as they force you to move into a job in which you are neither qualified nor interested in doing, so that you choose to leave and they don't have to pay you severance).

Advice to Management

You need a critical mass to make effective organizational change.

GM is a huge ship and pretty impossible to change the direction of the culture.

However:

  • Get a CEO who has worked in other types of environments and not GM all of her life.
  • Do a clean sweep of the level that reports to the CEO and then, carefully, select only a few of the lower layers of management to stay.
  • Get rid of all the layers of management.
  • None of this matters because GM will never listen and never learn.

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