Using Action Learning to Develop Human Resource Executives at General Electric

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Jack Welch, company Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at General Electric publicly blamed staff functions, especially Human Resources (HR), for creating, encouraging and sustaining self-serving, bureaucratic policies and procedures throughout the company. He claimed that these functions discouraged change and got in the way of managers managing their people and their businesses. He maintained that human resource managers in particular often seemed ignorant of how their businesses worked — what drove profitability, what opportunities and challenges their businesses faced in the marketplace. As a result, Welch fervently believed that many HR managers made decisions that worked against the best interests of the company. He pushed for radical downsizing of the function and retention, development and promotion of only those employees whose work made a significant and demonstrable contribution to business results. Human resource managers would have to ‘earn their place at the table’ by delivering financial results in partnership with line managers. Action learning as a human resource executive development initiative began to incubate at this time and in this context; the impetus for HR development through action learning projects at General Electric Co. (GE) came not from training and development managers, but from Jack Welch.