Barely 15 months in as the first woman to head a major automaker, General Motors CEO Mary Barra has been named one of the 10 most influential leaders in the world by Fortune magazine.
In the ninth position, Barra is the only auto exec in the top tier, and ranks well ahead of Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who was 23rd on Fortune’s list of 50 top global leaders. But Barra was just one of three women in the top 10 and actually was listed behind singer Taylor Swift, in Fortune’s sixth spot.
“Immersed in GM’s ignition-switch megacrisis almost since day one as CEO, Barra has deftly juggled the demands of investors, regulators, customers, plaintiffs, and employees on one of the business world’s most visible stages,” explained Fortune.
“She’s a company lifer,” the magazine added, “but her insistence on greater openness nonetheless broke the long-standing GM pattern of downplaying responses to product defects—and she is making a genuine, if still far from complete, effort to transform the automaker’s sclerotic culture.”
(GM rewards Barra with $9.6 million in stock for 2014. Click Here for the full story.)
The 52-year-old Barra was on the GM fast track when Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson unexpectedly announced plans to retire in late 2013. But her choice to replace him in the chief executive post was an even bigger surprise.
But Barra was soon hit with some other surprises. In February of last year, the automaker announced the recall of 2.6 million vehicles due to faulty ignition switches now linked to 100s of injuries and at least 74 deaths, according to Kenneth Feinberg, the outside expert hired to run a special victims’ compensation fund.
Within weeks, Barra was being grilled by separate Congressional panels while plaintiffs attorneys raced to file lawsuits against the giant automaker.
(Lawyers press for answers: did GM attempt to cover up ignition switch problem? Click Here for the story.)
Both Barra and GM have come under sharp criticism from those enraged by the decade-long delay in ordering the ignition switch recall. But the CEO has also received kudos, as Fortune noted, for not trying to duck the issue. In fact, Barra ordered an intensive round of housecleaning that uncovered dozens of other unresolved safety issues requiring recalls. The automaker ended 2014 having ordered service actions impacting more than 30 million vehicles, a major reason why the overall U.S. recall tally climbed to 64 million last year, double the previous record set in 2004.
The Michigan-born executive has largely silenced a small but vocal group of critics who initially argued that she was appointed CEO only to become the “fall guy” for the ignition switch issue.
Her actions have only buoyed supporters, such as automotive consultant Ron Harbour, who said last year there was just one reason Barra was promoted. Nobody gave her the job. She earned it,” said Harbour, who described Barra as “a quiet revolutionary” who knew GM inside and out and also knew the company had to change in order to survive.
Barra joined GM as an 18-year-old co-op student at GM’s new-abandoned Pontiac Motor Division, she followed her father, a die-maker and member the United Auto Workers Union, into the factories in Pontiac, Michigan.
GM’s management recognized Barra’s potential for promotion early on in her career. She was sent to Stanford’s prestigious MBA program at company expense not long after graduating from what was then known as the General Motors Institute with a degree in electrical engineering. After finishing up at Stanford, she returned to Detroit and moved to a series of jobs in engineering and manufacturing.
A key mentor along the way was Donald Hackworth, the blunt, tough-talking head of GM’s North American Car Group before he retired in 2001. Hackworth believed in giving women a chance and promoted several, among them Barra, to key positions.
(GM tabbed as haven for talented female execs. Click Here for more.)
By the middle of the last decade, change was rapidly overtaking GM, which had seen its once dominant market share shrink year by year. By then, the Pontiac Motor manufacturing complex in Pontiac was being demolished, building by building, and the division’s engineering group had been reorganized out of existence.
As GM slid towards bankruptcy in 2007, Barra, who had already been a plant manager, was promoted to vice president of manufacturing engineering, which put her in charge of finding ways to improve and streamline GM’s manufacturing operations. With the company in turmoil after GM emerged from bankruptcy in the summer of 2009, Barra was put in charge of GM’s human resources department, a tough assignment at a time when plants were closing and thousands of employees had been dismissed as the company tried to restructure.
It wasn’t the best use of her talent, former CEO Akerson quickly recognized, so a clearly impressed board of directors approved an even tougher assignment in 2011, putting Barra in charge of GM’s critical global product development, which had stalled by the bankruptcy. Again Barra was credited with using her management skills to streamline a sprawling, unwieldy organization and give it a sharper focus, observers said. That job served as her springboard to the CEO spot.
For her part, Barra generally avoids the question of gender. “When you approach a new business, assignment or activity, trust that gender has nothing to do with it,” she wrote in an online article for the Women’s Economic Club of Southeast Michigan. “We all come to the table, we all work hard and we all bring our skills. Mary has never thought, ‘Well, that happened to me because I’m a woman.’ Don’t go there! You have unique talents and you bring them to the table just like everyone does.”
