Making the Move to General Manager

Published: April 2, 2007
Author: Martha Lagace

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5608.html

People achieve success in the early years of their career by specializing and becoming functional experts—in essence, they succeed by knowing more and more about less and less, says Benjamin C. Esty, chair of the General Management Program at Harvard Business School. "But there comes a time when they have to recreate themselves as generalists. In this new generalist role, they end up knowing less and less about more and more. This is an extremely difficult and potentially very risky transition, and it can easily derail a very successful career. GMP is about smoothing and accelerating this transition into general management."

For new general managers—or just as likely in companies these days, senior functional managers who operate as part of an executive team or who have important cross-functional or cross-organizational responsibilities—their job has changed from driving excellence in a single functional area to integrating consistency, cohesion, and alignment across many moving parts in the business unit.

"When you're responsible for leading, it's not enough to do what you've done in the past. You need to fundamentally rethink what you're doing and where you want to go in the future."

The first big challenge for new general managers, says Esty, is seeing linkages and interconnections across the organization. The second is transitioning from the role of a doer to the role of managing through other people—and that's a big change.

"As a new GM, you will be one step away from the customers or one step away from the shop floor. Your job is much more about people and less about hands-on doing. So really the challenge is about delegation and achieving leverage; and on some level it's about finding, hiring, developing, and retaining top people. With those individuals, you then have to build an effective team.

"A lot of people aren't comfortable letting go; they want to do."

How it works
New skills, while important, are only a small part of what new general managers must possess. GMP's greater goal is to challenge them with new perspectives and ideas around people and organizations to help them forge connections across functional areas, says Esty.

To that end, readings and classroom discussions in GMP are very different from the Harvard MBA program, and from other HBS leadership programs. Where the MBA program develops functional skills, GMP uses business cases that cut across multiple functional areas and highlight the challenges of integration. The cases also focus on general managers from companies around the globe in an effort to mirror the international mix of participants. "We try to have cases that reflect the people in the group. More importantly, we choose cases with protagonists that have exactly these general manager jobs, who are 'the general manager in the middle' who have the incredibly difficult job of managing up, down, and across the organization.

"The cases are designed to get smart people to see different things in the same situation. In essence, the cases end up being Rorschach-like experiences: 'Here are some clouds. What do you see?' It's stunning for the class to realize that very smart people can come to very different conclusions. And so it really expands how they think about problems and gets them to focus on the process of making important decisions." But changing the way people think and improving their business judgment is what GMP is really all about, says Esty.


About the author
Martha Lagace is the senior editor of HBS Working Knowled