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To be a good leader, you need to be a good learner, said Jeffrey Malehorn, president and CEO of GE Healthcare Financial Services.
“Be a lifelong learner. Be curious,” Malehorn said in a speech to kick off the Marketing Challenge November 1 at the Charles M. Harper Center sponsored by Dean's Marketing Advisory Committee . “If you don’t have that trait, get it.”
That theme hails from a quote from GE Chairman Jeff Immelt, which Malehorn cited: “Leadership is an intense journey into your self. It’s about being self-aware. To be a good leader you’ve got to have clear values. You’ve got to keep learning. You’ve got to keep changing. And you have to keep reinventing yourself.”
Malehorn seems to have taken that advice to heart, having achieved several leadership posts at GE, from leading its European real estate business to its global financial restructuring business in Tokyo and then to obtaining his current position.
“You don’t spend 24 years at GE like I have so far and decide one day, ‘Well, I’m done learning how to lead,’” Malehorn said. “It’s a continual journey.”
Being a good leader means learning how to “take the big swing” and take risks, he said.
“I’ve had probably five large deals in my career to date where I’ve absolutely bet my career,” he said.
For the first seven years of Malehorn’s career at GE, he participated in its professional development classes, such as financial management training. If he was “the player” before, “now as a leader, I’m the coach,” Malehorn said, with about 30 percent of his time spent on overseeing organizational issues, training, and nurturing top talent.
He said he wants to give employees opportunities like those he was given “so they can go on and lead a business.” He said he had the benefit of “getting an early assignment, a stretch assignment,” so that he could start leading companies at an earlier age.
At one point Malehorn, as a “young punk,” was sent to California by GE for a position in real estate he had gotten over another employee well-versed in the field. Malehorn’s solution: he asked the employee to teach him what he knew about commercial real estate in exchange for Malehorn teaching him about what he knew about the GE system. The employee went on to head GE business in Australia.
It is crucial to foster an inclusive environment, Malehorn said. In the past he used to categorize employees interrupting him in his office as distractions, but said he has learned how important it is to “drop what you’re doing and engage them.” He said it’s also important to be able to “articulate the dreams of the people who work for you, not just in a surface-y way.”
In fact, Malehorn said he used to take it as a personal failure when a person of top talent left GE’s employment.
“It really gnawed at me,” he said. “I tried to take my value system and make it their value system.”
Malehorn said that he has learned to “empathize a little bit more” when he can’t convince a top employee to stay at GE. “It just reinvigorates me to go back and say, ‘Okay, what else can I do here?’”
Malehorn said other failures were “bad deals” he had conducted. “And usually for every bad deal, there was one or two or three things you probably could have picked up on during the underwriting, if you’d had your antenna up.”
In such a case he said he’ll dissect what was done to learn from it.
First-year GSB student Carl Gatenio said that he was impressed by the “breadth of experience” that Malehorn was able to achieve.
– Mary Sue Penn