What is a General Management Consultant?

A general management consultant will provide clients with thought leadership and business expertise. They lead client projects, maintain supportive relationships and promote business growth and development. General management consultants play an active role in mentoring and coaching staff and management, according to PayScale. They maintain high quality work and deliverables through exceeding professional excellence standards and displaying enthusiasm for achieving the best results.

Business Coaching

General management consultants execute their client’s objectives through frontline coaching of management and executives. They work side by side with frontline supervisors to change management behaviors. General management consultants understand how to identify operational, employee and performance improvement opportunities. They excel at building and fostering client feedback, relationships and communication.

General management consultants are also good at addressing and confronting issues by providing appropriate ideas and recommendations. They increase accountability of actions, roles and responsibilities by teaching management how to replace reactive supervisory styles with proactive and intuitive methods. They may be responsible for increasing employee engagement through facilitating workshops, unlocking staff ideas for improvement and sourcing appropriate metrics. As business coaches, general management consultants must know how to remove support, operational and communication barriers.

Business Strategy

When it comes to business strategy, general management consultants study their client’s mission, values and culture to provide a refined strategy focus. Once this is accepted by executives, they design and deploy new measures for procedural and departmental improvement initiatives. They may assist management teams with identifying major issues, facing clients, generating proposals, developing conclusions and implementing strategic recommendations. During these meetings, they may assist with client presentations, identify opportunities for organization change and building core competencies. For example, these could be related to project consulting, assignment performance, organization strategy and management operating systems. General management consultants change business cultures for long lasting results. In order to authoritatively direct executive-level strategy formation, they must develop a high level of personal and professional credibility with all stakeholders.

Change Management

General management consultants are often called into organizations to assist with the implementation of change management initiatives. They will work closely with clients to design, plan and present major organizational and transformational initiatives. These management consultants assist in the development of impact, industry, market, employee or management analyses. As a result, these consultants are expected to provide insightful input on how to handle, minimize and mitigate the associated risks resulting from change activities.

When it comes to change management, the business consultant should possess strong writing, communication, presentation and organizational skills. Spearheading change management projects requires consultants who are self-starters, proactive problem solvers and action-oriented team players. In order to be successful, they must know how to efficiently work with clients to define change management strategies, develop change management plans, conduct preliminary research and present stakeholder assessments.

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General management consultants often work with clients to review and develop policies that help employees with understanding, adopting and implementing new processes. General management consultants must know how to effectively communicate the requirements of new policies, professionally counteract negative feedback and implement strategic planning initiatives to achieve goals.