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GM urges staff to speak up

6K views 12 replies 7 participants last post by  Neanderthal 
#1 · (Edited)
Automotive News.. GM urges staff to speak up.

LINK

GM needs a decent computer based defect reporting system program that employees at the factory, mechanics at GM dealerships & worried customers can provide instant feedback 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world to GM. With a honest proactive and open saftey culture in place, it might just nip that defect in the bud before it becomes an expensive million car recall.

Harvard - Fixing a Weak Safety Culture at General Motors

On Monday, GM CEO Mary Barra apologized for 12 deaths and 31 accidents linked to the delayed recall of 1.6 million small cars with a defect in the ignition switches, saying the company took too long to tell owners to bring the cars in for repairs. The switches could, if bumped or weighed down by a heavy key ring, cut off engine power and disable air bags.

The question I ask here is not how and why did this dangerous defect occur, but rather what kind of company culture allows passenger safety to be so badly compromised?

Let’s start with the facts as we can glean them.

Fact 1: Broken communication channels. Reports on exactly when (and how) GM’s top executives learned about the switches vary. According to one report: “The company has acknowledged it learned about the problem switches at least 11 years ago, yet it failed to recall the cars until last month.” According to another, “GM has said the issue was discovered as early as 2001, and in 2004, a company engineer ran into the problem during the testing phase of the soon-to-be-released Chevrolet Cobalt.”

Fox Business reported, “Barra found out about a review of the Cobalt in December, when she was still head of GM’s global product development.” In an article on the recall in The New York Times, Barra claimed she didn’t “know the serious nature of the defects until Jan. 31,” two weeks after she became CEO, “when she was informed that two safety committees had concluded that a recall was necessary.”

This unawareness at the top would be impossible in an organization with a strong safety culture. In fact, the single-most-important attribute of such a culture is proactive and timely voice related to failures, a topic I have studied and written about extensively.

This willingness to speak up is especially true for the small and seemingly inconsequential discrepancies that can, when unreported, give rise to catastrophic failures later. Any organization can detect big, expensive failures! It’s the great companies that detect the small ones that otherwise go unnoticed. And, when news related to potential failures is withheld as long as humanly possible, safety is the first victim. Although all too human, the tendency to withhold — to wait and see — is driven out of organizations with strong safety cultures.

Fact 2: A recall. GM has recalled 1.62 million vehicles globally.

Certainly, the right thing to do is to show concern and to solve the problem. But that’s hardly a choice at this point.

Fact 3: An apology. Meeting with reporters, Barra said: “I want to start by saying how sorry personally and how sorry General Motors is for what has happened. Clearly lives have been lost and families are affected, and that is very serious.” In a video to GM employees, Barra apologized again, saying, “Something went wrong with our process in this instance, and terrible things happened.” David Cole, the former head of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the son of a former GM president, said it was the first time in his memory that a GM CEO has apologized for a safety problem. In fact, it’s more dramatic than that. As The New York Times reported, “corporate chiefs routinely avoid talking about recalls [period] unless subpoenaed by Congress.”

Barra’s apology is thus a strong and powerful step in the direction of building a safety culture at GM.

Fact 4: A new safety leader. On Tuesday, March 18, Barra named a new head of global safety, Jeff Boyer. She pledged to meet with him on a monthly basis and offered this description of how he would function in the organization: “Jeff’s appointment provides direct and ongoing access to GM leadership and the Board of Directors on critical customer safety issues… This new role elevates and integrates our safety process under a single leader so we can set a new standard for customer safety with more rigorous accountability. If there are any obstacles in his way, Jeff has the authority to clear them. If he needs any additional resources, he will get them.”

Creating a new leadership position focused on safety is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it shows seriousness of purpose. On the other, it risks compartmentalizing safety — which needs to be everyone’s job.

Fact 5: Product assurances. Barra further promised to repair all broken vehicles (and to double the number of product reviews). She has offered a $500 cash allowance to owners of recalled vehicles and asking dealers to offer loaner cars while their vehicles are in the shop for repairs.

This builds goodwill among customers, but doesn’t directly build a culture of safety within the company.

Fact 6: An internal investigation. Barra has launched an investigation internally at GM, which is expected to take about seven months to finish.

Learning from failure is one of the most important activities that occurs in great organizations, so this step is essential. But, of course, how the investigation is handled can make or break its usefulness. Is the point to find the culprits? Or to find out what happened, and what the company can do to make sure it never happens again.

All the actions that Barra has announced are good. Yet questions remain — including how could someone as product savvy as Mary Barra have had no prior knowledge of these issues?

Clearly, GM’s safety culture is, and has been for quite some time, badly broken. A strong safety culture stems from psychological safety — the ability, at all levels, to speak up with any and all concerns, mistakes, failures, and questions related to even the most tentative issues. Simply appointing a safety chief will not create this culture unless he and the CEO model a certain kind of leadership.

Consider the case of Allan Mulally. Soon after being hired as Ford’s CEO, Mulally instituted a new system for ensuring that he learned about problems. Understanding how difficult it is for bad news to make it up the corporate hierarchy, he asked managers to color code their reports: Green for good, yellow for caution, red for problems. He was frustrated when, during the first couple of meetings, all he saw was green. It took considerable prodding before someone spoke up, tentatively offering the first yellow report. After a moment of shocked silence in the group, Mulally applauded, and the tension was broken. After that, yellow and red reports came in regularly.

The failure to speak up about safety and other problems is not unique to car companies. Silence and shooting the messenger remains the norm in far too many companies, and this won’t change unless leaders proactively invite and embrace messages of small, large, and potential failures. To do this, leaders need to override human nature by practicing two crucial behaviors that keep bad news coming early and often:

Embrace the messenger. In a strong safety culture, leaders understand the risks of unbridled toughness. A punitive response to an employee mistake will be more effective in stifling future news of problems than in preventing them. A company’s ability to detect and solve problems is absolutely crucial to its ability to learn about them.

Reward problem detection. Failures must be exposed as early as possible to enable learning in an efficient and cost-effective way. In an interview with the McKinsey Quarterly, Mulally illustrated the shift this entails: “For example, an employee decides to stop production on a vehicle for some reason. In the past at Ford, someone would have jumped all over them: ‘What are you doing? How did this happen?’ It is actually much more productive to say, ‘What can we do to help you out?’ Because if you have consistency of purpose across your entire organization and you have nurtured an environment in which people want to help each other succeed, the problem will be fixed quickly. So it is important to create a safe environment for people to have an honest dialogue, especially when things go wrong.”

These behaviors go a long way toward building the robust climate of psychological safety that is the foundation of a strong safety culture. Companies that have this are far less vulnerable to physical safety failures that can harm customers, employees, and communities.

LINK

It looks like Alan Mulally has installed a great safety reporting system in place at Ford, its great news to see Barra like Mulally another great CEO is now pushing to install this culture at GM.

With cars becoming so electronically over complex these day l have always wondered if the humble wire has been overlooked taken for granted by the auto industry, there have been so many recalls linked to electrical devices from just about every car manufacturer in the business, should the industry be setting higher wiring standards. The aircraft industry went through a similar nasty patch with a few crashes a that got linked to the humble wire & electrical devices. After the TWA 800 747 crash investigation findings that was linked to a wiring problem a wire carrying high voltage arced into low voltage Fuel Quantity Indication System, the wires were positioned in to closer proximity. After the crash report findings they decided to make drastic changes in the aircraft industry worldwide regarding wiring as aircraft like car have become very complex miles of wiring inside. A new safety regulation SFAR 88 legislation - EWIS (electrical wiring interconnection system) was introduced to deal with the problems of ever increasing amounts of complex electrical devices & wiring in aircraft.


Can a humble wire bring down a 747?

The aircraft industry findings of TWA 800 crash were that aircraft had become so over complicated more and more & more reliant on complex electronic devices, and the the basics of humble wiring had been ignored forgotten and have been the route cause of a lot of other crashes. So everybody employed in aviation industry Design/Manufacturing/Aircraft Maintenance was require to do basic mandatory EWIS (electrical wiring interconnection system) training every few years so they don't be complacent when working on or around wiring, its just basic be aware of stuff - safe bend radius when routing cables, safe distances between wiring looms, to tight looms route wrongly, safe pitching of p-clips 6-9 inches, keeping wiring 0.5 inch away from fuel tank & structures in conduits, carbon arching that can heat up to 19,000F melt through aluminium 1220F, cable ties pulled to tight that cut in to looms, keeping contaminants from hydraulic fluid or fuel when working on components keep spill area's away from wiring clean them up, keeping dust build up in older models/drill swarf and debris away from looms that can cause arcing short circuits, cleaning up etc etc all basics. Cars have become more technically complex electrically with things like electric steering, should the humble wire often overlooked be taken more seriously by auto industry as well?
LINKhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_wiring_interconnection_system
 
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#3 ·
Consider the case of Allan Mulally. Soon after being hired as Ford’s CEO, Mulally instituted a new system for ensuring that he learned about problems. Understanding how difficult it is for bad news to make it up the corporate hierarchy, he asked managers to color code their reports: Green for good, yellow for caution, red for problems. He was frustrated when, during the first couple of meetings, all he saw was green. It took considerable prodding before someone spoke up, tentatively offering the first yellow report. After a moment of shocked silence in the group, Mulally applauded, and the tension was broken. After that, yellow and red reports came in regularly.

I recall that section of one of the Ford books I read.

Every week at the executive meeting or whatever it was called, everything was hunky-dory. IIRC It was Mark Fields who first raised his hand to report some less-than-minor glitches. As the article states, Mulally applauded him and thus the ice was broken.

That said, I don't know what Harvard has to do with this but there it is in a sub-head. Harvard is a seriously biased political organization that has far outlived the status of its name.

And quoting the party line on Flight 800, when there were dozens of eyewitnesses regarding a vapor trail leading to the plane, coverups and threats during the investigation, does nothing for the report's integrity IMHO.

Instituting a green-yellow-red system could work. The most important factor in making something work is when you can somehow ensure the whistleblower will not be punished either overtly or covertly.

GM could use an Internal Affairs or Internal Audit that is beholden to no one and is as non-political as humanly possible. So could the feds for that matter. My wife did federal audits, and almost everyone hated to see her walk in the door (sign of the cross please) because so many people were so corrupt and the system was full of let-it-be folks or fellow travelers. That was a culture of corruption.

One guy died suddenly of a heart attack while at a casino on government time in a government vehicle. They found a warehouse of stolen stuff when they started snooping around. Did his wife know? Not in any way as far as the investigation could reveal. Did his buddies know? You betcha. Did his supervisors know? You betcha.
 
#4 · (Edited)

GM could use an Internal Affairs or Internal Audit that is beholden to no one and is as non-political as humanly possible. So could the feds for that matter. My wife did federal audits, and almost everyone hated to see her walk in the door (sign of the cross please) because so many people were so corrupt and the system was full of let-it-be folks or fellow travelers. That was a culture of corruption.



LOL its funny how those that carry out quality audits have that affect on people, everybody moves like a shoal of fish to a safe hiding place the moment the auditor walks in the building. When you wife started doing the audits did she think she had a B.O. problem Neanderthal?

Audits are a great way of lifting quality, surprise audits work better. Normally the manager in the area is made aware they are coming and clean up a crap hole the day before they are due to arrive.

At the end of the day GM need a computer based car defect reporting system that can help nip problems in the bud. To enable the guy on the production line that might notice something that does not quite right, or in service it's enable the mechanics at the dealerships that spot faults that might have got overlooked that have to fix faults with cars that the customer has reported as a problem that need sorting out. A defect reporting system is not system to grass someone up, if there is a problem it should be a honest no blame early warning system that serves as safety tool that defects can be analysed by a team of experts to see if they need sorting out. A decent reporting system just might save millions of cars getting recalled at great expense to GM, but most important of all it might save lives which is just priceless.
 
#7 ·
Internal audits won't fix these problems and, more importantly, aren't necessary to fix these problems. For example, is there anybody here of moderate intelligence and balanced perspective who hasn't known, for many years, that the corporate culture at GM is broken? Is there anybody here with those same qualities who didn't know this long before the bankruptcy? I hate to be this blunt, but internal audits are very often just something corporations do when they know that the wheels have come off the train and everybody is too afraid of person A or person B to just say it like it is. So, instead, they offer up some internal audits where a mid-level manager or two get their heads lopped off so the executives really pulling the strings don't have to, after which they are replaced by another guy or gal who also knows better than to tell those same executives who are still in the same positions the truth........and so the song remains the same.

Make no mistake, despite the dog and pony show that you are seeing right now, this is actually just a very public production of them doing their damndest to wriggle out of this mess without changing a thing that actually addresses what is really wrong here.
 
#8 ·
Audits identify problems and the people behind them or who enable them.

As I clearly stated, whistleblowers need to be assured of protection and any clearing of the ways requires integrity at the top.

If this was easy some corporations would have done it. Some government entities too.

One bad apple...
 
#10 ·
Audits identify problems and the people behind them or who enable them.

As I clearly stated, whistleblowers need to be assured of protection and any clearing of the ways requires integrity at the top.

If this was easy some corporations would have done it. Some government entities too.

One bad apple...
We don't disagree fundamentally, my problem is with the catch 22 the issue I highlighted in your post brings to the table. To wit, the problem with most companies is that the inmates are running the asylum, and the root of most issues goes directly to the top whether by apathy or direction. In cases where it does not audits as an ongoing process aren't as important, because if you have long-lasting integrity at the top you'll almost certainly have a culture that corresponds to that.

Any new executive body is going to have to audit for a time to be sure, in order to make sure they have cut out any cancer throughout the organization as a whole. But as you insinuate audits won't do much good right now, because the people who would be running those audits are as much a part of the problem as is anybody else.
 
#11 ·
When I started working at a manufacturing facility, they had 3 levels of audits. The problem was those audits were focusing on giving demerits to the shop (getting brownie points for QA), instead of identifying the defect and fixing the process, so that the defect would not happen again.

As a member of one of the quality organizations, my supervisor told me to find defects and recommend fixes to the process, which included incoming inspection of parts from other suppliers. My boss caught a lot of flack whenever I shut the shop down, but within 6 months, we reduced scrap (defective product) from $300K a month to under $90K a month. Suddenly, the shop asked for more inspectors and the monthly scrap continued to decline, while shipments of "quality product" went up.

It seems to me that one of GM's many problems is parts coming from it's suppliers. Do the parts meet specifications and do the specifications fit the actual product use? It needs to tighten the up the incoming inspection audits and give the inspectors (Auditors) the authority to shut down manufacturing until the problem is corrected.

Neanderthal is right about audits and I doubt that there will be a problem with the people running them. With the current publicity about GM defects, the company would be cutting it's own throat if the auditors were not given total authority to identify problems and recommend fixes .... directly to the top level of management.
 
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