At Work Newswire

By D. Quinn Mills

Becoming a general manager often means changes in the way a departmental or staff manager thinks, reacts, and manages.

A general manager is a line manager—that is, he is responsible for directing the basic business of a firm. But there are many other managers in a business, most of whom are involved in a particular function—like accounting, or finance, or marketing, or human resources. Many people start their management careers in a function —a staff activity—and then move on to general management.

Managers are always responsible for the work of other people—this is true in general management and in functional management. So a person who is a successful manager has already made the substantial transition from being an individual contributor (a worker, whether blue collar, clerical or professional) to being a manager. But there is an additional change of mindset to be made when moving from being a functional manager to a general manager.

A general manager is responsible for how functions in a business or government organization come together to make the whole effort work successfully. General management requires two things:

• A focus on the overall result; and
• An understanding of how the different functions fit together to achieve the overall result.

It is this broad—and general—orientation that distinguishes general managers—they are expected to focus on the organization writ large.

Making the transition

The first thing that a person who leaves a function to become a general manager must do is focus on the overall result and give up any effort to manage a former function. We are all attached to where we came from—it’s our home in a sense. We have friends in the function; we know how to manage it well. But for these very reasons, we have to be careful not to retain our focus on the function but instead we must master the other functions and allow them their full contribution to the overall success of the business.

We must let go of the function we’ve left. We have to give it up to a successor who is now the manager of the function, and we have to turn our attention to all the other functions we are now managing. People often fail as general managers because they can’t let go of their previous function. “He runs the business like the only thing that matters is marketing,” a frustrated employee might say of a general manager who can’t let go of his former role in marketing.

A general manager too attached to his former function continually leaves his new duties undone to continue to run his former function. This is a great error.

To avoid this error, a new general manager should devote most of his time and attention to learning what the other functions contribute to the overall result. She should meet with the functional managers who report to her and learn what they do. A new general manager will have an overall concept of how all elements relate, but she’ll be more limited in her understanding than she realizes by her previous focus on one function primarily. She must keep an open mind about how the whole thing operates.

Management is partly about people, as well as systems, schedules and results. A new general manager must show impartiality among people from his former function, who were likely his close associates and friends, and people from other functions who now report to him. He or she must not show favoritism to his former associates in the function from which he came. He must even, sometimes, give higher performance ratings to people in other functions when they have earned them.

It is a general manager’s role to see that work gets organized, that individuals take responsibility for particular tasks, that tasks are coordinated so that they add up to accomplishing an overall objective, and that the work is done on schedule and to the necessary standards of quality. It’s the basic objective of a general manager to create out of the various functions of an organization a top performing unit.

D. Quinn Mills, the Alfred J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (emeritus), consults with major corporations in the U.S. and globally. He has written extensively on leadership, strategy, and management issues.

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Copyright © 2007 D. Quinn Mills

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