Inclusive Leadership: The Mary Barra Way

Born as Mary Makela, Barra was brought up in Waterford Township, Michigan, a middle-class suburb north of Detroit. As a kid,she excelled in math and science, and after completing high school in 1979, she joined the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) in Flint, Michigan, in 1980.

One of her first assignments as a student in General Motors Institute was to work at a Pontiac metal-stamping facility. The facility was used for smashing flat sheets of steel into car parts. “It was the kind of environment that could frighten off a lot of people, including men,” saidTroy Clarke, a former GM executive who also worked there early in his career. However, Barra reportedly liked the experience and developed a partiality for manufacturing...