John P Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the Chief Innovation Officer at Kotter International , a firm that helps leaders accelerate strategy implementation in their organizations. His newest book, Accelerate, was released in April 2014.
In his article – What Effective General Managers Really Do, John P Kotter provides a overview of a typical General Manager’s role and how he/she needs to spend time in network building and agenda setting, which forms an important activity for an effective General Manager.
The General Managers need to spend time building network and getting networks to implement agendas. They show impromptu behavior at work unlike conventional practice of rigid planning. They hold impromptu meetings and spend time bonding with subordinates and influence people above and below their line of work.
John P Kotter distinguishes different patterns of daily behaviors of General Managers based on the GMs approach their jobs, the nature of their job and the type of people involved.
- Pattern 1: Spending most of their time with others
- Pattern 2: Spending most of their time with many others besides a boss and direct subordinate.
- Pattern 3: The breadth of the topics covered in daily conversations are wide
- Pattern 4: Asks a lot of questions.
- Pattern 5: Agenda Setting and decision making are processed in mind and are often invisible in paper.
- Pattern 6: Use of humor and nonwork discussions as an effective tool.
- Pattern 7: They spend time on issues that are unimportant to them.
- Pattern 8: They rarely order others and make use of their direct and indirect influences.
- Pattern 9: Spend lot of time trying to influence others.
- Pattern 10: They don’t plan their days much in detail and instead react based on the coming influences.
- Pattern 11: Their conversations are short and disjointed.
John P Kotter breaks the stereotype and conveys that “wasting time” type behavior of general managers is more important than ever.
The author says that the organization should not be overmanaged. Overmanaging paves way to underleading the organization in various ways of disconnection between the employees and the managers.
Managers need to manage the “human” side through bonding and network building in addition to their organizational duties.
To combat the uncertainty and resistance inherent at work, the General Managers spending time in discussing avocation and divertissement, hold impromptu meetings and solicit the interaction with people far from their level of hierarchy. They indulge in such activities with an intention to acquire vital information, build and maintain valuable relationships.
Unplanned and Unstructured activities help General Managers address two critical challenges:
- Deduce what needs to be done
- Gaining widespread co-operation.
To capitalize on the unanticipated opportunities that rise in daily events, they plan flexible agendas. To channelize their influences far beyond their level of command, General Mangers make use of impromptu encounters.
To overcome these challenges, they make flexible agendas and broad networks of relationships.
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