Your Best General Manager Is Not a Free Consultancy for Every Other Site

The best general manager often becomes the organisation's informal help desk. Another site needs a rota reviewed, a new manager wants advice and head office asks for a quick opinion on a launch. Each request looks reasonable. Together they can consume the attention that made the manager's own operation successful.

The business may regard this as collaboration. It is also a resource allocation decision, frequently made without a budget, a time commitment or a discussion about what will stop. The manager is performing a second role while remaining accountable for the first.

For a growing group, this arrangement can create dependence on a person whose contribution is difficult to replace. The more useful they become, the less time they have to build the structures that would reduce the organisation's reliance on them.

Make the hidden assignment visible

Start by identifying the requests the manager receives outside their own remit. Which are occasional peer support, and which amount to ongoing operational responsibility? What decisions are they making for other sites? Who is accountable if the advice is not followed or produces an unintended consequence?

An illustrative hotel group might discover that a successful general manager spends a regular part of each week supporting two weaker locations. If so, leadership should decide whether this is a temporary recovery assignment, a formal regional role or work that belongs to the other sites' managers and their development plans.

Leaving the arrangement informal avoids a difficult structural decision, but it does not avoid its cost. The manager's own team may receive slower decisions, fewer development conversations and less attention to emerging problems.

Transfer judgement, not just answers

Repeated advice becomes more valuable when it helps the receiving manager develop a method. Ask them to describe the issue, the evidence and the options before seeking a recommendation. After the decision, review what happened and what they would do next time.

Capture recurring lessons in usable operating guidance, while recognising that local conditions may require judgement. A template can support a decision; it cannot replace an understanding of the customer promise, resources and risks.

Where the same site asks the same questions repeatedly, examine capability and authority. The problem may require structured development, a clearer role or a performance discussion. Unlimited access to another general manager can conceal the need for that intervention.

Fund the contribution you want to keep

If the business genuinely needs the manager to support the group, agree the assignment explicitly. Define its scope, time allocation, authority, support and success measures. Adjust expectations at their home site and consider the implications for recognition and reward through the appropriate people process.

The arrangement should also develop successors. Who can take on decisions at the original site? Who will become capable of providing future support? An assignment that strengthens several managers is more sustainable than one that merely spreads a single expert across more problems.

Review the effect on the supported sites and the manager's own operation. Improved results elsewhere should not conceal deterioration at home or an unreasonable personal workload. The relevant question is whether the group is building capability or borrowing it indefinitely.

Key-person dependency is often created by admiration for a capable colleague. Recognising that person's value properly means designing a role the business can sustain, with enough capacity for others to become useful too.