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.