Technology
Listening in
How Dean Seavers interacts with employees and customers to find the best ideas for growth at GE Security
By Brian Horn
Smart Business | October 2009
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Within two weeks of joining GE Security Inc. in 2007, CEO Dean Seavers was at an industry trade show, and it wasn’t just to schmooze and get word out about the company. He was there to meet with customers and find ways the company, which focuses on security and safety products and is a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric, could improve.
He kept hearing the same things from customers: The right solution at the right time when they needed it.
“When you hear a recurring theme, you realize there are a couple of challenges,” he says. “So, there at the show, we actually had most of the senior team with us, and we pulled everyone aside, we talked about it, and we said, ‘What seems to be the biggest challenge in terms of making sure we could deliver that, because those are fundamentals to the business?”
Working the trade show was just a start for Seavers. He had to listen to those around him to get an idea of what the best direction was for his organization.
“We spent a lot of time with our customers so we could understand their needs and how we were performing relative to their expectations,” he says. “We also spent a lot of time with our channel partners to better understand how we could be a better partner. Of course, we spent a lot of time with our employees who had great ideas about productivity improvement. There were a lot of common themes coming from these sessions and that was really the genesis of our strategic imperatives.”
Those imperatives — superior customer experience, competitive products, winning solutions, global growth and simplification — would become the drivers that would give the company a clear direction and the ability to excel for the future.
“We all get caught up in our current assignments,” Seavers says. “So, taking a step back from that, initially for me, it’s really having a clear direction in terms of where you are going.
“The way you really get there is spending time with customers and employees to figure out what’s really important and what you’re really good at and developing a vision to go after it.”
Here’s how Seavers interacts with employees and customers to find the best course for GE Security to take.
