What is a General Manager?

What is a General Manager?

🔥NEW A General Manager (GM) is an executive / senior role within a company, overseeing most or all of a firm's functions. Contrary to functional managers, GMs have a broad, overall responsibility for profit and loss in a company (or a major part of it), and they manage across all or at least multiple functions (i.e., finance, marketing, operations).

DEFINITION OF A GENERAL MANAGER
A general manager is a person who has a broad, overall, general management responsibility for a particular business or organization or some substantial area of it.

JOB TITLES of GENERAL MANAGERS
Persons having a general management responsibility may be called in various ways and hold many different job titles, including (but not limited to):

• President
• Senior Vice-President (SVP)
• Vice-President (VP)
• Regional Vice-President (Regional VP)
• CEO
• Senior Partner
• Partner
• Managing Director (MD)
• Director
• General Manager (GM)
• Manager
• Country Manager
• Segment Manager
• Regional Manager
• District Manager
• Branch Manager
• Etc.

CHARACTERISTICS OF GENERAL MANAGERS
People performing the above mentioned jobs are all general managers. What sets a GM apart is that he or she has a broad, overall, general management responsibility for a particular area of a business or organization. Unlike a functional manager who has a responsibility just for a particular function, like HR, Logistics, Finance, Marketing, etc.

Another thing what distinguishes a GM is that he or she is typically a generalist, while a functional manager is typically a specialist.

A generic management education like business administration, business economics or business law, and/or a broad experience with multiple functions in the company are a typical background.

Typically a GM ranks higher and has a higher salary than functional managers when they are in the same part of the organization. On the other hand, a CFO with the finance responsibility for an entire multinational ranks higher and earns more than the GM of the Italian subsidiary of that firm.

		srinivas Lecturer, India
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		Blondeel Consultant, Morocco
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		Loh Tean Hin CxO / Board, Indonesia
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		Mark Buzan Canada
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		Maurice Hogarth Consultant, United Kingdom
	The Function of General Regardless of the actual job title, all managers a (...)