Dress Appropriately

How two words created a culture of trust and Empowerment.

TRUST

https://solomonprogram.org/empowerment-dress

Like other companies its size, GM used to have a long, complex dress code policy, one that ran 10 full pages. GM is a $62 billion company with roots going back 100 years–the kind of giant, legacy organization you might think would get bogged down with bureaucratic minutiae. But when the company emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, then-vice president of global human resources, Mary Barra, seized upon the dress code as a symbol.

She took a linguistic machete to the policy, as part of a desire to change company culture, recalled Barra, who became the company’s CEO in 2014. It was a chance to send a message that big didn’t have to mean bureaucratic. Big could still mean short and to the point. Big could still mean empowered.

So, just those two words: “Dress appropriately.”

And yet, some high-ranking managers, who’d been used to the longer, much more comprehensive policy, pushed back. To them, “dress appropriately” sounded in practice like another two-word phrase: “Anything goes.”

One manager complained to Barra that an employee was dressing too skimpily under the new policy. Another manager complained that his employees were interpreting the new rule too liberally.

As Barra said in an interview, some of their concerns weren’t totally unreasonable. For example, the manager who was concerned about employees dressing too casually said his team sometimes had to deal with government officials.

“He was worried that if they were in jeans or something, that wouldn’t be appropriate,” Barra recalled.

Still, she pushed back against the pushback, insisting that the manager with the jeans-wearing employees try to work out a solution. A few weeks later, they talked again, and the manager said his team had reached its own easy solution–come to work in jeans, but keep some nicer clothes at work in case they needed to change for an outside meeting.

“Problem solved,” Barra said, adding that “the big ‘a-ha’ was that you need to make sure your managers are empowered, because if they can’t handle ‘dress appropriately,’ what other judgment decisions are they not making?”

“Don’t find fault, find a remedy.”

HENRY FORD