applied know how
The foundation of being a great General Manager is not your skill or focus, its your ability to bring together and bring the best out of a great team of people. In the seventh in our series I’ll discuss how to do that.
Ok I’m going to make a provocative statement, bear with me … good general managers do not really “do” anything. … Read more
How you make decisions is a critical part of the make up of a new General Manager, in the sixth part of our series I’ll dicuss bias and how it limits our decision making.
General managers need to be aware of the biases that affect us all and so be vigilant in mitigating their impact – by such means as forming diverse teams, soliciting independent opinions, collecting wide-ranging data, reframing questions and assigning and rotating the role of playing “devil’s advocate”.… Read more
I hope this series of posts in transitioning into General Management remains interesting, in today’s fifth post, I’ll focus on the real focus of a General Manager, their customers.
Every decision in business must be based on serving customers first and foremost, solving their problems and doing so in such a way that the organization makes enough money to survive and in so doing enables other stakeholders to benefit.… Read more
The fourth post on transitioning to a GM will focus on time frames and moving from what is usually a short term focus for functional heads to the need for a GM to be longer term in thinking/
Successful general managers resist the temptation to oversimplify the job by focusing on a few narrowly-defined short-term performance indicators and instead maintain integrity by looking at the long-term, organization-wide impact of any acts or decisions.… Read more
This is the second post in transitioning to the role of General Manager
When managers move from a functional role, they lose the shared identity they have had with the people who work with them. Moreover, general managers sometimes have to make decisions that may not seem to be in the best interests of their old departments. To ensure that there continues to be open and honest communication it is essential that the manager demonstrates fairness, openness and genuine respect.… Read more