GE HealthCare’s Culture Takes Lessons From the Marines

In January 2023, General Electric spun off GE HealthCare as a publicly traded company, and in 2024, it generated revenue of nearly $20 billion. With more than 50,000 employees, GE HealthCare has built a strong culture — the highest-rated culture among its peer companies, based on Glassdoor reviews. Employees speak particularly positively about feeling respected, being treated fairly, and having development opportunities.

GE HealthCare’s chief people officer, Adam Holton, learned about how to build a strong organizational culture early in his career, in the U.S. Marine Corps. “The Marine Corps believes in culture,” Holton said. “They believe that culture exists in all organizations. They believe that you get exactly what you put into it. And they believe that culture can be hugely positive or hugely negative, or somewhere in between. There is an intentionality to how they think about culture.”

A strong culture is the foundation that allows the Marine Corps to empower front-line leaders to make decisions in the most challenging conditions imaginable. Holton offered this example: “What I found in the Marine Corps was a very, very positive inertia that had been formed over decades and centuries from a standpoint of the importance of really empowering the individual riflemen.” That’s important, for example, because serving as a fire team leader, a second- or third-year Marine typically has to lead three other Marines, he noted.

Holton recently shared how he applied key insights about building a strong culture in the Marine Corps to the corporate world, and what other leaders can learn about inspiring specific positive behaviors.

1. Translate Values Into Behavioral Terms.

“The Marine Corps does a good job of putting culture in behavioral terms, putting names to the things that they want to see,” Holton explained. “It is a continuous feedback organization, where you know if you are in and out of spec and you’re not really left wondering, ‘Am I exemplifying the behaviors that are expected of me in the organization?’

“Behaviors, to me, are the secret,” Holton said, “because once I can put something in behavioral terms, I can do everything that I want with that. I can select people to it, I can develop people to it, I can recognize and reward people to that, [and] I can promote people to that.”

In the run-up to its IPO, GE HealthCare articulated five cultural operating principles to help translate culture into day-to-day behavior. “The nomenclature around them is very intentional. … It is about culture, it is about principles, but mostly it is around how we operate,” Holton said.

2. Train for Desired Behaviors.

“The Marine Corps has a tremendous history and a core legacy around learning and training,” Holton said. “We trained all the time so that our people could do the basic things in their sleep. And what we found was when you did that, then the combination — putting things together in situations you hadn’t experienced before — was so much easier.”

For each of GE HealthCare’s cultural operating principles, Holton explained, “we have distilled them into leadership competencies or behaviors. Everything that we do from a learning standpoint … starts and ends with those principles and the behaviors that tie back to them.”

Training for desired behaviors at GE HealthCare focuses on having people practice skills rather than acquire knowledge. “Knowledge without application doesn’t really work,” Holton explained. “And I have been struck throughout my career [by] how much learning and development actually stops at the knowledge part and doesn’t really get to the application of it — and then we wonder when nothing actually changes.”

3. Hire and Promote People Who Exhibit the Desired Behaviors.

The organization’s processes to hire, develop, and promote people serve as the most powerful levers to embed behavior, Holton emphasized. “When you think about somebody being able to be the type of leader, the type of culture magnet, the type of colleague that you want, there’s two components to that,” Holton explained. “There is how you select those people, and then there is how you develop them. But if I have to pick one over the other, it’s not even close. It’s, how do we select people who are more predisposed to have the behaviors that we believe are going to make our organization … fulfill our purpose, execute our strategy more effectively?”

Succession planning complements GE HealthCare’s hiring process by emphasizing the same set of desired behaviors.

4. Simplify Processes.

Leaders need to avoid the temptation to proliferate behaviors to the point where the sheer number overwhelms employees. “When you have 72 leadership competencies, you have zero. How are you going to focus on them? How are you going to prioritize them?” Holton said. GE HealthCare was fortunate to build on “the heritage and the legacy of GE” and a “strong set of annual core processes that run the gamut of how we run the organization,” financially, legally and talent-wise, he noted.

However, the IPO provided GE HealthCare with the opportunity to simplify key processes. “We took a very hard look at, with a critical lens, are our processes simple enough?” Holton said. “I think there were times where we would pat ourselves on the back and say, ‘We’ve got this great, comprehensive process. That must mean we’re doing it well.’ And I think at times we confused comprehensiveness with effectiveness. Making them as simple as possible, imbuing the behaviors into those processes, you have a much better chance of them sticking and that being successful.”

Want to hear more advice from Holton? Watch this conversation and the entire series on the CultureX YouTube channel, on Spotify, or on Apple Podcasts.