I work in Greenville and the problem has always been a lack of true leadership. If i had a business and ran it like GE i would have been out of business a long time ago. There will be hourly layoffs at Grenville there is no doubt.
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What you describe at GRC is exactly what has destroyed GE Power.
There are few if any managers now who have any depth of knowledge of the business. Many managers of technical groups have never done the work, and don't know how since it often takes around 5 years to be really technically competent. Bad decisions after bad decisions are the result since they only want to get promoted and move on.
GE Power is a now a mess with bloated management now instead of experts who know how to do things and advance the company products and services. The cost structure of operating like this is horrible that just cutting across the board will not fix.
GE needs to go back to what it was being a technical meritocracy and get rid of the fakers.
So many of the posts here speak of bad management / leaders. Why don't the so-called managers do something about it instead of perpetuating the problem by hiding away. If they have had all this management training because of their potential, is it not time to see if they actually have some management ability.
I was at GRC, but the issues were similar to what folks are complaining about now in the GE businesses. When I started 30+ years ago, the managers had nearly all started at the bench, and worked their way up technically before moving into management. The first level managers probably had 10+ years of technical experience before becoming managers, and were well respected by employees as well as their counterparts in the GE businesses as experts in their fields. Several of the upper level managers, (what we were calling Technical Directors when I left) had many years at GRC and dozens of patents and other evidence of strong technical expertise. This was the norm then and the expectation of new employees was that you earned your stripes by doing good technical work before you moved into management, if that was your ambition. If your interest was in remaining technical, that was OK ,and such a role was still valued. The technical level was flat, without all sorts of layers and titles. The focus was on doing quality research relative to the GE businesses with a longer term perspective, and transitioning the work to the businesses for commercial implementation as the technology matured.
In recent years, more and more new hires seemed to have the ambition of becoming project leaders or lab managers right out of the chute, rather than an interest in doing any technical research. There was suddenly strong competition to get into the Corporate Audit Staff or various leadership programs, or become Six Sigma black belts, all with the aim of advancing quickly upward in the organization while bypassing the previous technical rites of passage. With the introduction of the technical career path at GRC, suddenly there were a slew of titles and promotions to compete for. The role of lab manager lost its technical component. Politics and favoritism bloomed, and doing solid technical work seemed to take a back seat to whatever helped one get promoted. Lab managers were appointed right out of grad school, or with no background in the technical area of the lab, and technology leaders were appointed with very little experience or expertise, all because they were some higher up's Mini-Me or to meet diversity objectives. Such people that were prematurely advanced struggled to gain the confidence of their staff or their business customers - a lose-lose proposition all around. Experienced upper level GRC managers with strong research backgrounds were replaced by managers from the business with little or no understanding of what role research should play. Too many projects were taken on that should have and could have been done in the businesses. Too many design-oriented projects led to GRC being in competition with the design groups in the business, leading to unhealthy rivalries and a dilution of the uniqueness of the GRC skill set, and the view of the businesses that GRC had something unique to offer.
So in the spirit of offering solutions, rather than just b***ing, I would suggest that the company return to the practice of having people with managerial aspirations first demonstrate their technical (or business) related expertise, before moving up the the management ranks, rather than the apparent current practice of bypassing the need for acquiring technical or business acumen via routes such as CAS, Leadership programs, Black Belts, and such. While any company clearly needs leadership with strong financial skills, for a technology company like GE to differentiate itself it also clearly needs management with strong technical competence to make the right decisions as to what promising areas to focus on going forward, and which ones to wind down.
At GE, if you test the status quo by offering up solutions and pushing for them, you will get fired. That's what happened to me. Now I've started my own business and am drinking GE's milkshake. HAHAHA!!!
Don’t offer solutions, just b--ch constantly...that’s the American way!
Lack of leadership from a cell leader perspective? Manager perspective? Plant manager perspective? How would you solve the issue? Where would you get different leaders from? I'm simply questioning out of curiosity.