Training & Development

“Leadership development is always evolving. As a leader you can never stay static.”
– Susan Peters, Executive Development & Chief Learning Office

What makes GE unique is our continuous drive to grow and adapt to a changing environment. Because of the dynamics in today’s environment, the Company recognized that what is required of leaders to be effective is changing. To remain effective, we must understand the environment surrounding us, the global culture affecting our communities, and how this will impact us and our lives. In the spirit of continuous learning to be better leaders and better human beings, we embarked on a journey to evolve our Growth Values – the DNA of our culture.

The updated Growth Values will better equip us with the behaviors necessary to overcome the challenges of today and tomorrow. We are bringing these Growth Values to life and helping develop these behaviors through our Global Learning Curriculum. In this period of renewal, GE is investing more than $1 billion annually in our training and development programs, helping our employees to have a greater impact in our businesses & community.

Our Evolved Growth Values

External Focus

Being connected with different stakeholders, such as customers, governments, regulators, NGOs and community groups, is an important behavior for a GE Leader today. These partnerships help us understand how GE can provide solutions and shape an outcome for a better future.

External Focus is also about being educated on global issues and being curious about what’s happening in the world, and how that impacts GE and us as leaders. Given how connected the world is today, events occurring in one part of the world can have a significant impact on another part of the world.

As GE expands operations in emerging markets, it is important for us to expand our cultural awareness and global capability and embed our learning from around the world in our training programs. While GE has operated its Corporate Leadership Institute in Ossining, New York, since 1956, our training and development capabilities have expanded over the years with the Company’s global growth. Today, GE offers training programs in additional hubs including Shanghai, Munich, Bangalore, Abu Dhabi, Mexico and Brazil. This global expansion of learning and development efforts will continue in coming years as the Company furthers its reach into Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. While a majority of courses will be taught in English, an increasing number will be available in different languages, since our audiences vary in level of experience and English-speaking ability.

Clear Thinker

Today’s leader must be adaptive and agile. In a rapidly changing environment filled with uncertainty, being able to connect the dots and make sense of a situation is key. Our leaders must be comfortable making a decision using the knowledge they have, combining that with their experience and leveraging their instincts. It’s also important to have the ability to connect strategy to purpose in a way that inspires and drives commitment. For GE this purpose goes beyond business. It is about providing solutions to tough societal problems.

GE educates employees to be not only better leaders, but better people as well. As a result, the skills acquired through GE Global Learning benefit leaders beyond GE walls, extending to their homes and communities. Programs often incorporate a community service component, giving employees hands-on experience in acting as GE ambassadors.

Imagination & Courage

For today’s leader, while generating innovative ideas is important, it’s equally essential to be courageous enough to implement those ideas. This often requires taking risks, trying new things and pushing ideas through the organization.

Our leaders need to place their personal credibility/reputations on the line to passionately advocate for what they believe in, creating breakthrough solutions that profoundly change the market and affect people and communities.

This passion for trying something new has led the Global Learning team to create a wide array of On-Demand eLearning resources. Since every employee cannot attend a Crotonville leadership course, these eLearning courses and reference ware bring to the employees the contemporized Growth Values in creative new eLearning formats.

Inclusiveness

Inclusiveness is the ability to build a great team. And to do this effectively in today’s environment, listening is key. It starts with humility—knowing that, as leaders, we don’t have all the answers and that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. To get to the best solutions, a GE Leader must be willing to be open to different views even if they are opposing or contrarian thoughts.

An Inclusive leader is one who collaborates across, down and outside the walls of GE. This requires respecting others’ ideas and respecting others’ cultures to get the best out of an individual. It’s important to understand and value diversity of cultures, generations, customers and thought processes.

As part of our executive training programs, leaders continually seek wisdom from outside GE, from other subject matter experts and institutions. They bring back their learning to help us continuously improve as leaders as we drive success for the Company, for its people and for its communities.

Expertise

Having deep knowledge in an area of expertise is more important than ever. In today’s world, general knowledge doesn’t allow us to have a significant impact, so it’s critical that we always seek to deepen our area of expertise and to stay current.

Included in this definition is a commitment to learning and growing and a passion to develop others. The development needs and goals of individual employees are directly linked to the training available to them and to their managers. A system of internal coaching is in place to ensure that these resources are directly embedded in the development plan of each employee, no matter what level.

With technology being such a significant part of how we live every day, we need to push ourselves to embrace and integrate new technologies into our day-to-day work. This includes social media, collaboration tools, productivity tools, etc. This is especially important as new generations come into the workforce with ever-increasing technological savvy.

Extensive Telepresence capabilities across the globe in our offices are enabling conversations with teams from around the world. We have also extended this capability to remote locations such as Brazil, Shanghai and Germany to allow employees from around the world to connect and learn from each other. The rollout of Virtual Collaboration Suites to several GE facilities expands the team’s ability to “train the trainers” worldwide, as training and development methods evolve. Beyond these advancements, a robust Education Management System brings top-quality education to the desktops of thousands of employees at every level.

This process of searching better ways of doing things and preparing our employees to be better leaders does not stop only in our Growth Values but impacts our GE Global Learning.

The Crotonville Leadership team is in the process of revising the GE leadership curriculum to align with current and future challenges.

“We’re looking at the content we teach, the technology we use and the overall experience we deliver,” says Janice L. Semper, Manager Executive Development

The changes will impact the umbrella of GE Global Learning and three primary programs.

• Crotonville Leadership — named after the original location of the executive education center — fosters forward-thinking skills in leaders at all levels
• The Functional Skills program provides tools for leading specific functions, from finance and human resources to operations and engineering
• Business Knowledge courses enhance employees’ business acumen and knowledge of GE products and services

Built into each of these course areas are topics relevant to citizenship. GE educates employees to be not only better leaders, but better people as well. As a result, the skills acquired through GE Global Learning benefit leaders beyond GE walls, extending to their homes and communities.

The words of our Chairman sum up this spirit of developing our ability to contribute to building a better future and a better community: “We are a finance and infrastructure company out to solve the world’s biggest challenges.”