Develop These 3 Skills Today to Become a General Manager Tomorrow

Ask any senior executive and they will tell you that one of their most important duties as a leader is to develop people. And more specifically, educating future general managers: the people who will run the business tomorrow.

Unfortunately, reality often falls far short of desires.

When John Hillen and I wrote our last bookOur decades of experience working, observing, and researching countless companies has shown that each of these organizations spends extensive time and effort growing and improving their business. But less than 10% of these companies had a specific plan to grow their leaders as well as the business.

This is an important gap! Without a plan to develop leaders, business growth will stagnate and companies run the risk of not having enough qualified senior executives to take them forward. Worse, the business growth plan will come to fruition, but the companies will flounder as they struggle to meet the demands of their own success.

Some Cold Water

• Few companies have successfully recruited top GMs from outside. Research by major executive search firms paints a bleak picture: Heidrick and Struggles, for example, report that 40-50% of senior executives hired from outside leave within the first 18 months due to performance or fit issues.
• Internal promotions tend to work slightly better because managers already know the culture and have internal support. Yet many companies report that only 60-65% of internal promotions are successful; This shows that these leadership transitions are a real challenge.

If you’re an ambitious manager, all of this goes to show that you shouldn’t rely entirely on your employer to develop the skills you need to become a general manager and succeed as a general manager. Your career path (bigger roles, broader scope and more responsibility) is in your hands. So let’s zoom in on where you need to start.

Don’t Wait: Start Now

People with great careers don’t wait for their organizations to catch up, get buy-in and budget, and create a leadership development program. Instead they start themselves up quickly to develop the basic skills they will need as general managers.

Our colleagues Frank Rouault, Jean Segonds and Vince Byrne found in their research(1) that future chief executives Must develop skills in three critical areasbut these aren’t areas we usually think about, like operations, finance, and marketing.

On the contrary, the most promising and successful GMs of the future show meaningful growth in areas that remain beyond conventional wisdom:

1— Technical skills: Technical expertise, which is necessary but not sufficient, points to managers who excel when improving processes, driving innovation, and creating business value. GM stars are constantly honing these skills to move past obsolescence, choose best practices, and add their own value to the company. Along with domain expertise and business proficiency, technical skills include:

• Functions focused on running the business: finance, marketing, supply chain, innovation, legal and compliance, risk, IT, digital, strategy and governance
• Special skills: problem solving, adaptability and curiosity

2— Interpersonal skills: Working well with others is an absolute must to succeed in rapidly changing organizations. Nearly every business problem is rooted in a miscommunication, a difficult conversation gone wrong, or a broken relationship. (And sometimes all three!) Research on emotional intelligence shows that even the smartest, most technically skilled managers will fail if they lack the critical human skills to lead change and build followers. Interpersonal skills include:

• People-oriented functional areas: human resources, culture, recruiting, onboarding, talent assessment, professional development, incentives and rewards, career path, management training, leadership development, engagement, retention and termination
• Special skills: Communicate, collaborate, manage conflict, influence, mentor, teach, coach and inspire

3— Social-systemic skills: Networking skills are important things: A solid network is essential for nurturing mutually beneficial relationships, influencing without authority, and providing the power to get things done. But great GMs add: proactive stakeholder management Skills: Anticipating what your most important stakeholders want and need and ensuring that these transactional and non-transactional relationships produce the desired results. Social-systemic skills also include:

• Functional areas that focus on the parties involved in the broader business: customers, partners, investors, vendors, suppliers, regulators, government agencies, industry groups and trade associations, and professional affiliations
• Special skills: Identifying key contacts, connecting people, developing non-transactional and trusting relationships, helping others, developing social networks, joining associations and groups, participating in board or volunteer work, and meeting clients (and even clients’ clients)

How to Start Becoming a General Manager?

Now that you know the lay of the land, let’s look at how to navigate it. Here are some specific approaches to help you develop the key skills you need to demonstrate on your path to becoming a great GM:

Technical Skills

Focus on:

• Creating business impact: Improve your entrepreneurial skills. Look for new ways to deliver growth and results.
• Developing expertise and contribution: Deepen the experience and know-how that others value.

Ask yourself how you can:

• Preventing technical obsolescence?
• Do you want to learn to think in the future tense?
• Are you developing expertise in core functional areas such as sales, marketing, finance, IT and HR to drive results?
• Catalyzing innovation?
• Do you want to develop yourself as a thought leader in your field?
• Looking to align your team, colleagues and others with key business priorities?
• Are you sure you’re focusing on the right tools to achieve your business goals?

Interpersonal Skills

Focus on:

• Understanding and bringing out the best in yourself: Optimize your best qualities, people competencies, leadership skills and impact.
• Bringing out the best in others: Optimize the technical skills, people competencies, leadership skills and impact of others.

Ask yourself how you can:

• Will you develop yourself as a leader of people?
• Do you want to develop others and increase their abilities?
• Are you looking to develop and improve your management style or leadership practices?
• Want to create more engagement (“hearts and minds”) at work?
• To be seen as a role model?
• Are you leading important people initiatives? (For example, recruiting, integration, management, right-sizing.)

Social-Systemic Skills

Focus on:

• Develop a strong network: Create a diverse, active and mutually beneficial network before you need!
• Engaging your stakeholders: Build non-transactional relationships and seek win-win situations as you navigate your career toward your long-term goals.
• Contributing to the community at large: Give back. Share your learning and expertise with others by serving on a board or volunteering.

Ask yourself how you can:

• Create and activate your network?
• Create a more diverse network?
• Want to help more people in a given month?
• Are you developing meaningful relationships with people who truly want to see you succeed?
• Are you giving people reasons to refer to you as an expert, mentor or trusted advisor?

If you’re serious about being a great general manager, You need to start working now to become the leader you know you can be and creating your own growth trajectory with a learning strategy and clear action plan. This article is enough to get you started: challenge your inner GM to run with it! And seek coaching, mentoring, and advocacy from GMs you admire; The best GMs will always make time for you.

We’d love to hear how you’ve progressed and what you’ve learned as you develop these key skills to become a great general manager. Drop us a line at [email protected].

Many thanks to my colleagues Elisabeth Jensen Maurer and Alain Perez for their excellent contributions, and of course to Frank Rouault for his research and wisdom.