for everything
The general manager doesn't really do anything. Rather, he or she is responsible for managing the managers: those who do tasks and manage others who do other tasks. If your people are not excited, motivated and determined to come to work, to continue to learn and adapt, and to drive decisions and actions to continuously re-establish the business's competitive advantage and use it to create and capture value, then you are not succeeding as a general manager. Use regular feedback to assess whether your style is motivating individual members of your team, and always search for solutions to maintain high morale.
And remember, in spite of the pressures of business, people like to have fun. Look for opportunities to release pressure and build team morale through activities such as innovation competitions, brainstorming exercises with prizes for the best ideas, and team-building exercises oriented around problem solving.
8. Success depends on teamwork
In addition to building morale, a GM must ensure that ongoing communication is taking place between team members to minimize siloed thinking, reduce inconsistencies and avoid conflicting efforts, which undermine overall efficiency and effectiveness. We work in teams to accomplish tasks one person cannot achieve alone. But there is a difference between a high-performing team and a low-performing one, and this difference is the GM's responsibility.
To achieve high performance, the team must have trust across all parties, a shared respect for the different roles, a common objective (creating long-term value) and regular communication. The general manager must be vigilant in ensuring these elements are in place, and are continuously reinforced and transparent to all.
9. Learning comes from trust and fairness
The challenge of business – to deliver value to the customer more efficiently than the competition – is unrelenting. In order to continuously build the competitive advantage that allows the business to achieve this goal, all members of the team need to be involved, motivated and working in a coordinated way. Moreover, they must always be searching for new, innovative and creative ways to do it as the world – consumer preferences, regulatory rules, the competitive landscape, the technological frontier, the macroeconomic environment, and so on – continues to change around them.
This continuous learning can take place only if all members of the organization perceive fairness in all dealings and a sense of collective trust both in one another and in the decision-making process itself. The GM must always seek opportunities to reinforce these pillars and must, with equal diligence, watch for behaviours that undermine them.
10. ‘Practice time’ is critical
We learn through failure and the conscious effort to reflect on it, so that we can modify the process or adopt new techniques to improve. Musicians, athletes and others recognized for displaying high levels of performance in a particular area all go through a similar learning process: practice, feedback, reflection and coaching. These high-performing individuals are diligent and deliberate in practice, and in maximizing the learning from experimentation, so that their ‘best’ becomes subconscious and can be instantly deployed come game time.
The general manager must actively look for ways to incorporate experimentation and learning through feedback into day-to-day business. Only he or she is able to provide this space by encouraging learning, supporting experimentation and avoiding behaviours which hinder either one. Learning occurs when the GM builds experimentation into the business in such a way that potential losses due to failure are less than the expected value of the learning to be achieved. The GM who can build into the day-to-day management of the business a culture of continuous learning through small-scale and rapid experimentation will be rewarded with motivated teams and a productive organization.
We have organized this book around three broad categories relevant to every general manager: managing the business, managing others and managing yourself.
The first section, Managing the Business, provides a concrete business context for the more personal leadership issues discussed in the latter two sections. The three chapters in Section 1 will examine the idea of long-term value creation, explore the implications of a long-term value perspective on business decisions and conclude with the importance of translating an understanding of the concept into actual financial calculations.
Section 2, Managing Others, deals with the difficult leadership transition of managing your team in a new context – that is, as a general rather than a functional manager. As the functional manager transitions to a role of general management, the challenge now becomes one of managing the managers, a greater challenge than was managing the doers who were often merely waiting to be told what to do. Good GMs do not simply tell the managers what to do; they seek ways to motivate, encourage and maintain a shared commitment toward the goal of value creation, without actually telling anyone what to do.
The key to success in managing others is the kind of communication that fosters an open environment perceived by all as fair and trusting. The three chapters in Section 2 deal with the new relationships created by the altered hierarchical positioning and the according need for improved communication, the challenge of managing different personal and political factors and, finally, the importance of both separating emotions from decision-making and keeping biases, personal agendas and opinions out of the process.
In the final section, Managing Yourself, we delve into the deep personal awareness needed to be a fully-performing general manager. At this stage of the journey, the only thing that matters is the ability to learn how to learn – constantly, and without allowing opinion, personal agendas or political manoeuvering to compromise value-based decision-making and effective management of those around you.
To become truly successful leaders, general managers must embrace their own individual journeys, which will in turn allow them to complete the transformation into ongoing creators of value for their organizations. The three chapters in this final section tackle three highly sensitive and important issues: managing one's own feelings in order to empathize with others while remaining an objective and effective leader, becoming comfortable and confident about one's role without having to be an expert on each topic or feeling a sense of competition among your peers and, finally, successfully managing subconscious motivations, to remain effective, fair and, as ever, value-oriented.
In the chapters that follow, you will encounter each GM's individual scenario via a description or transcript of the situation in which they find themselves, mirroring what we showed on the videos in the interactive platform. Also listed are the specific questions we asked our participants to respond to. We then proceed to a general discussion about the comments received from our contributors, according to specific themes that emerged and, finally, to our own commentary regarding the original situation, the varying factors at play, the reactions and behaviours of the particular GM, and what it means to his or her overall evolution.
Our goal in creating these general managers and their respective passages was not merely to solicit reactions from those already familiar with the ideas we teach. It was to highlight the multifaceted changes that anyone must face if he or she is to succeed as a GM in a truly global, rapidly changing and fiercely competitive world.
Allow us to introduce our three fictional GMs:
Freddy Walsh is VP IT, North America, for Prism International, a New York City-based media conglomerate focused on distribution of film and television content, with over 5000 employees and offices in 15 cities across the globe. Freddy has held four different positions within Prism over the course of a dozen years. He has moved three times during his tenure with the company, first from his native Toronto to San Francisco, then from San Francisco to the company's headquarters in New York City. This most
