Michael Bai’s ERG Experience Helped Him Forge Better Connections in Work and Life

From a very early age, Michael Bai has been an inveterate tinkerer. “I just loved working with my hands and solving problems,” he says. He recalls pictures of himself as a toddler clumsily thumbing screws onto a computer. As a child, he proudly put on a spare tire when he and his mom were stranded in New Jersey with a flat (they made it to a repair shop successfully). He refurbished the carburetor on the family lawn mower and replaced the water pump on his dad’s old Acura, taking on each project “partially out of necessity,” he says, “but mostly out of interest.” His only role model for this kind of thing was a grandfather who had no formal engineering background. “He showed me at a young age how to fix small devices and electronics with little formal instruction or tools,” Bai recalls, “but always with a lot of curiosity and intuition.”

After completing two summer internships and earning a mechanical engineering degree from Tufts University, Bai brought a similar spirit of play to GE Aerospace. He entered the Edison Engineering Development Program at the company’s Lynn, Massachusetts, site, just north of Boston, and completed an intensive aerospace engine design curriculum. “Just as importantly,” he notes, “the tough classes and weekly homework taught us early-career engineers really quickly how to work effectively in a group and solve problems together.” 

After working in design engineering and supply chain integration roles, Bai was tapped to manage an engineering subsection, then later became a commercial rotorcraft customer service leader. In this organization, his on-site field service teams worked around the clock with customers operating helicopters involved in search and rescue missions and oil and gas transport, which dramatically expanded his horizon. “When you’re representing the company and on the front line resolving issues, you’re troubleshooting not just the technology but also the customer relationships,” he says. This, he soon discovered, is where he thrives.

Growing the Asian Pacific Alliance

Through it all, Bai has been shaped by his experiences with GE Aerospace’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). “I’ve been heavily involved in them from the start of my career,” he says. As an intern, Bai joined his site’s chapter of the Asian Pacific Alliance, which “was one of the first things that took me outside my immediate work environment.” He recalls one of his first experiences helping prepare for the heavily attended annual Lunar New Year event. Gradually he was drafted to take on more responsibilities — planning holiday events, coordinating community service in Boston’s Chinatown — and eventually became the Asian Pacific Alliance’s leader at Lynn. Over time he’s watched the group become more creative and inspired than ever.

He cites one member who revived a ping-pong tournament tradition that began in the early years as a small one-day event in Chinatown and has since expanded beyond the Asian Pacific Alliance to include players from across the whole Lynn site. Years earlier, another member organized a volunteer event to check out the Boston Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival races held on the Charles River. “She was committed to creating a GE Aerospace dragon boat team, so a couple of years later she built interest within the group, gathered the budget to secure a corporate slot, and made it a reality,” he recalls. “In the years after that, it built momentum to the point where it’s now an annual tradition and we recently won first place in our division.”

Over the years, Bai has come to recognize the ERG as invaluable to his own professional growth. “Not only does it allow everybody to meet each other outside their immediate professional group,” he says. “It also connects you to a larger community within GE Aerospace.“ And it has fostered the skills he uses every day in his current role as an international program manager.

Building Better Relationships

Bai considers this role — helping his customer integrate GE Aerospace engines into significant “indigenous” aircraft programs — to be “a culmination of prior work experiences,” he says. “I have to understand how all the aspects of the business operate to make sure the customer gets their aircraft program off the ground.” And he counts the inclusive culture of the Asian Pacific Alliance and the company at large as crucial to his success in this pursuit.

“Even though I came up in a U.S.-based corporate culture, a lot of my communication tendencies come from how I was raised,” says Bai, who’s fluent in Mandarin and spent two years abroad as a teenager. “In our ERG, I helped develop national workshops to help people recognize and navigate different communication styles. And in my last role, I was able to use some of that awareness to work through various field disruptions with our international customers, by helping bridge the cultural gap.” 

As much as the Asian Pacific Alliance has helped mold his professional skills, Bai has never considered the value of the group to be in “career development” per se. “I was just looking for somewhere outside of my strictly work environment, where I could meet different people and have fun,” he says. “Without ERGs, a lot of people would come to GE Aerospace unaware of all the amazing people and how they got where they are. We wouldn’t have the community we enjoy today.”

Just the other day, Bai attended a celebration with four close friends he had met through the Asian Pacific Alliance at various different points in his career. “At some point in life, they may not be at GE Aerospace anymore, but the friendship endures because of the community we had at work,” Bai says. “I think we should be able to all agree that that’s something really special and meaningful.”