Good morning! Fortune writer Natalie McCormick here.
Mary Barra’s rise from an intern to the corner office of General Motors seems almost predestined.
The CEO was born in a suburb of Detroit, the automotive capital of the U.S., and appropriately nicknamed the “Motor City.” While a student majoring in electrical engineering at General Motors Institute, now Kettering University, she joined the carmaker as an intern on its Pontiac Motor assembly line. Upon graduating, she became a senior plant engineer, a role she held for three years. Her success as a leader spurred GM to award her a scholarship to the Stanford Graduate School of Business. After graduating with her MBA, the automaker promoted her to a senior staff engineer.
The promotions kept coming. Over the next 30 years, Barra consistently rose the corporate ladder from general director to executive vice president, never staying in the same position for more than four years at a time.
In 2013, GM announced Barra would become its next CEO after one year as its executive vice president of global product development. The incoming CEO told Fortune that year that she attributed her success to a leadership breakthrough she had in 2003 when running a GM assembly plant. “I realized it was not just about how hard I worked but also about unifying the team, making sure we were working in a common direction, and then really communicating it to the 2,000 people that were part of the General Motors assembly team at that site.”
Almost immediately after stepping into the corner office in 2014, she faced her first big challenge as the company’s top leader. Nearly three million cars had faulty ignition switches, causing at least 124 deaths between 2005–2015. GM was forced to recall the cars and paid $900 million in fines. Barra says she still uses this fatal misstep as a companywide teaching moment on the importance of a culture where employees feel emboldened to speak up. “We put policies in place saying we want people to speak up—if you see an issue, you need to say something,” Barra says in a new Fortune profile published last week. “The best time to solve a problem is the minute you know you have one. Because problems don’t usually get smaller, they get bigger.”
GM had its best financial year in 17 years last year and is moving forward on its goal, announced in 2021, to only sell zero-emission vehicles by 2035.
Since taking over as CEO, Barra has consistently ranked among the top five on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list. This year, she returns to the No. 1 spot, which she held from 2015 to 2017.
Barra will join Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell on Oct. 16 at the Most Powerful Women Summit to discuss the auto industry’s transformation over the last decade—and where it’s headed. Watch the live stream here.
Natalie McCormick
natalie.mccormick@fortune.com
Today's newsletter was edited by Ruth Umoh
