When an organization loses its way, there are almost inevitably questions about its leadership. And these, just as predictably, tend to focus on such matters as whether the leader in question was too charismatic or not charismatic enough, whether her or she had managed to convey their vision and whether the strategy they had decided upon was correct or even achievable. Often, though, the problems are more basic. For all the time, effort and money spent on leadership development, many executives find it difficult to make the leap from being a functional expert to becoming a general manager.
Kevin Kaiser and Michael Pich, professors closely involved with the Transition to General Management program at the INSEAD business school, have collaborated with writer I.J. Schecter to produce a book that seeks to address the problem by putting fictitious managers in the sorts of situations that befall their real-life counterparts and then helping them find their way out. The result is Becoming A Top Manager (Jossey-Bass), a concise handbook that is neatly split into three sections – “Managing the Business”, “Managing Others” and “Managing Yourself”.
As if this breakdown is not sufficiently direct, the authors begin with a list of “key success factors for transitioning to general management”. Even if they do not make it through the whole of this relatively short book, anybody who is about to make or who has just made the move from running a department to a wider role could do worse than digest this list. As Kaiser, Pich and Schecter write, “The transition to general management is a change indeed, and it requires serious mental and emotional effort.” After all, as they point out, it often involves unlearning much of the knowledge that has been acquired over many years. Encouragingly, the authors do not suggest that the current environment requires special attributes. Being effective requires the same things today as it will require tomorrow: “the willingness to lead, the openness to learn and an unwavering commitment to creating long-term value”. At the heart of the change is an acceptance of the complexity and scope of running a whole business as opposed to part of one.
The success factors identified are:
- Questions are more important than answers. Managers of departments commonly attribute their success to their knowledge and experience. As a result, they become used to having the answers. But a general manager cannot have all the answers. It is more important to be able to ask the right questions.
- Trust is key. When they move from their functional roles, managers lose the shared identity they have had with the people who work for 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.
- Beware of your expertise. Because successful functional managers often attribute their success to their specialist knowledge or expertise they can be tempted to rely upon it as they move into a wider role. This may lead to them not acknowledging the importance of other parts of the business and so compromise their ability to have a genuine appreciation of the whole organization.
- Value is not earnings. Or market share. Or share price. Or ... Moving into general management involves shifting from short-term to long-term thinking and from thinking about a single area of responsibility to considering the impact on the entire organization. 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.
- Business is about serving customers. Every decision in business must be based on serving customers and doing so in such a way that the organization makes enough money to survive. Since other companies are focused in just the same way it follows that any discussion not centered on the customer and efficiency needs to be reframed.
- Bias has no place in sound 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”.
- Morale counts for everything. The general manager does not really do anything. Instead, their role is to create the environment in which people are motivated to do good work. It is important that the general manager seeks regular feedback to ensure that he or she has a style that is motivating people and always looks for ways of maintaining high morale. They should not forget the role of fun in this.
- Success depends on teamwork. In addition to building morale, thegeneral manager is responsible for ensuring that people work well together in teams. The difference between high-performing and low-performing teams is the general manager’s responsibility.
- Learning comes from trust and fairness. Business is always a challenge. So it is essential that all team members are involved, motivated and working in a co-ordinated way. They are only going to be always looking for fresh opportunities and solutions if they perceive that the workplace is fair in all its dealings and that there is a sense of collective trust. It is up to the general manager to reinforce these perceptions and to be watchful for anything that might undermine them.
- “Practice time” is critical. The general manager must actively look for ways of building experimentation and learning through feedback into the day-to-day business. If he or she can build into the daily management of the business a culture of continuous learning through small-scale experimentation they will be rewarded with motivated teams and a productive organization.
No doubt, others might have other priorities. But it looks like Kaiser, Pich and Schecter have come up with a valuable start. And if they have helped convince organizations that effective leadership is not all about vision and strategy then so much the better.
