Leadership Engagement

For more than 130 years, GE has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to performance with integrity. At the same time that we have expanded into new businesses and new regions and built a great record of sustained growth, we have also built a worldwide reputation for lawful and ethical conduct. This reputation has never been stronger.

But none of that matters if each GE employee and leader does not make the right decisions and take the right actions. At a time when many people are more cynical than ever about business, GE must seek to earn this high level of trust every day, employee by employee. Each person in the GE community makes an annual personal commitment to follow our Code of Conduct, reflected in The Spirit & the Letter. This set of GE policies on key integrity issues guides us in upholding our ethical commitment. At GE, “integrity” is not merely a compliance program or a set of good intentions, but a set of behaviors and actions that are integrated into the business strategy of our company and are reflected in our culture.

GE believes that a healthy compliance program depends fundamentally upon our leaders, who are charged with setting priorities and personally driving culture. Each year at the annual Global Leadership Meeting, Jeff Immelt states the nonnegotiable expectation that leaders will shape the integrity cultures within their businesses. GE’s leaders are expected to:

• Visibly set the example for integrity; employees take their cues from leaders, and GE’s leaders must “walk the talk.”
• Proactively incorporate regulatory requirements and risks into business strategy.
• Communicate, with passion and conviction, the importance of integrity at every appropriate opportunity and every level within the organization.
• Personally lead compliance processes through compliance review boards and risk review meetings.

GE’s program is focused on training and preparing leaders for this critical responsibility. We have taken the following actions to support leaders in building a world-class compliance culture. We:

• Published Leaders Guide to Integrity, a booklet that outlines a GE leader’s critical integrity responsibilities.
• Delivered mandatory in-person senior executive Compliance Leadership training.
• Launched new in-person Professional Compliance Leadership training that targets mid-level managers and details their responsibilities in driving a culture of integrity. More than 4,000 employees have attended the training.

We recognize that only performance based on ethics will maintain our reputation, increase our customers’ confidence in us and our products and services, and enable us to be successful. Ultimately, we want to develop leaders who are guardians of GE’s culture, champions of our legacy and protectors of our reputation.