Читать книгу Becoming A Top Manager - Kaiser Kevin - Страница 6

Functional leaders promoted to executive positions often find themselves lost at sea – unfamiliar not only with the responsibilities surrounding their new role but unsure of the skills and tools necessary to execute them successfully. The marketing manager promoted to partner; the communications lead moved up to the boardroom; the unit head who suddenly finds himself at the executive table. Individuals in such positions tend to quickly discover that the knowledge and capabilities that allowed them to thrive in their previous job have little bearing on the new one, and that a whole new set of skills – or rather, a whole new way of thinking – is suddenly required. They realize that to deliver their new mandate they must change. But how?

We decided the best way to answer this question would be to pose it to past participants of our executive education programmes, a broad mix of people from different backgrounds, industries, companies and geographies with one thing in common: they are somewhere on the new learning curve of what it means, and what it takes, to become a successful general manager. We asked this community to participate in the project via an interactive online platform through which they would watch videos of our three fictional general managers in action1 – general managers created to represent a fair cross-section of role, industry, background, gender, experience and personality – and then, in response to specific questions we provided, offer comments, observations and stories of their own related experiences.

We were delighted both by the enthusiastic response from so many willing contributors who took time out of their jobs and lives to watch the videos and provide comments, and by the depth and diversity of the insights and reflections they offered. These insights and reflections not only provided great context for the chapters that follow, they also allowed us to identify 10 key success factors that we feel will help guide others in making a similar transition from functional to general management. We present these 10 themes below, which you will see repeated throughout the book.