General Management: the tasks and skills analysis

While there are so many specific duties and tasks that general managers  are responsible for, their knowledge and abilities must encompass general or basic know-how in many different areas be it operations, supply chain, finance or marketing and so forth. In many cases, these people are charged with ensuring that other managers or supervisory staffs have their departments, subordinates, and duties well-organized and are working competently and efficiently to meet various set goals or targets that they and their teams are accountable for.

The general managers are oftentimes an overseer, people whom other managers meet with to discuss ideas, concerns, issues, and ask for solutions or decision . In a small or medium-sized company we oftentimes find that the general managers themselves are the CEOs in the companies as they are in charge of overseeing nearly every functional area of the business like operations, finance, marketing, corporate services, audit, stakeholder management and so forth. Similar situation even also exists to a foreign company operating in a country like Indonesia where the country managers also become the CEO or President or Managing Directors of the companies.

Being a general manager is a very challenging responsibility, but being a good one can mean a lot of good things to the company be it reputation, improved staff morale, productivity, satisfied customers, increased profitability and operational excellence.

General managers often spend their time in coaching, motivating, mentoring and meeting key customers and investors. They offer insights into many areas of their companies’ operations. That's why general managers should be people who have been highly experienced in one or more of such key functional areas as operations, marketing, supply chain, finance, corporate services, for them to be successful. It would be very painful job for people to become general managers without having prior experiences in leading and managing the functional areas in their companies.

Because of the complex nature of the general managers' tasks they need some good skill sets to perform effectively in their day-to-day duties. In my experiences following is some of the so many skill sets being critical to become an effective and successful general manager:

1) You should have excellence in execution: local P&L management, cost control, driving for business results: “entrepreneurship at the local level”. Remember that your ultimate objective is to make money while maintaining your product quality or service reliability, customers' loyalty and increasing your company's share holder value at all times;

2) you should have ambassadorial skills, that is to manage the external environment and enhance the reputation of your company.

3) Knowledge of local people and their cultures, values, norms and practices as well as local laws and regulations become more and more important for general managers who are actually county managers or CEO in the companies. Country managers should ideally be the local people or foreigners who have lived in the country for years whose skill sets meet the expected requirements for the job because and whose cultural awareness are reliable as conflicts may easily arise due to misunderstanding and cultural differences in either business or social context. Such conflicts may end up dragging the company into further conflicts such as labour disputes, local communities filing legal suits and commercial litigations against the company.

3) You should possess the cultural sensitivity in order to be able to effectively formulate your strategies, lead your team,  and serve your clients or customers;

4) You should have a sufficient understanding of corporate and social responsibility to responsibly manage your company operations at large;

5) You should have the leadership skills in terms of setting a vision for the business, gaining alignment and maintaining morale and team spirit of your team;

6) You should have the ability to hire and develop great talent, both local and expatriate for the company to be innovative, competitive and profitable;

7) You should have customer management skills: driving sales growth through an effective go-to market strategy and acting as business partner to local clients, distributors, customers, retailers.

Thank you.