Top 12 General Manager Skills to Put on Your Resume
In today’s competitive job market, standing out as a general manager candidate means showing a sharp mix of strategic thinking, operational rigor, and people savvy. Your resume should spotlight the top general manager skills that prove you can lead teams, grow revenue, and steer complex operations without losing the thread.
General Manager Skills
- Leadership
- Budgeting
- Negotiation
- Salesforce
- Project Management
- Strategic Planning
- Team Building
- Microsoft Excel
- Problem Solving
- Risk Management
- Communication
- Time Management
1. Leadership
Leadership, for a General Manager, means setting direction and rallying people toward it. You guide decisions, communicate with clarity, and shape a culture where teams do their best work.
Why It's Important
Leadership fuels alignment, execution, and momentum. It underpins change, drives accountability, and keeps the company moving—even when the path twists.
How to Improve Leadership Skills
Grow leadership by combining self-awareness with action:
Develop emotional intelligence: Notice triggers, read the room, regulate your response. It steadies decisions and builds trust.
Strengthen communication: Be crisp about goals, honest about trade-offs, and clear on what “good” looks like.
Build the team: Hire for strengths, coach deliberately, and create collaboration habits that stick.
Adopt a growth mindset: Treat feedback as fuel. Adjust fast. Learn faster.
Decide with conviction: Use data, weigh risks, commit. Revisit when facts change.
Model the culture: Show the behaviors you expect. Consistency is contagious.
Keep improving: Reflect regularly, seek mentorship, and measure your impact—not just your intent.
Leadership is never finished. It sharpens with practice, humility, and results.
How to Display Leadership Skills on Your Resume
2. Budgeting
Budgeting is the discipline of planning and allocating money to strategies and operations so the business hits its targets without overspending or starving priorities.
Why It's Important
It aligns resources to strategy, controls costs, signals trade-offs, and sets a scoreboard for performance. Profit doesn’t happen by accident.
How to Improve Budgeting Skills
Make budgets precise, living, and transparent:
Set SMART goals: Clear targets make allocation and accountability simple.
Analyze history: Spot patterns, seasonality, slippage. Learn, then plan.
Involve owners: Bring functional leaders into the process to improve accuracy and buy-in.
Monitor monthly: Track actuals vs. plan, surface variances early, correct course quickly.
Use the right tools: Spreadsheets for agility, budgeting platforms for scale and control.
Scenario plan: Build best/base/worst cases. Prepare, don’t predict.
Upskill the team: Train managers in financial literacy so decisions match the math.
How to Display Budgeting Skills on Your Resume
3. Negotiation
Negotiation is the art of finding terms both sides can accept while protecting your objectives. For a GM, that spans suppliers, partners, customers, and internal stakeholders.
Why It's Important
It controls costs, secures value, resolves conflicts, and preserves relationships that you’ll need again. Outcomes and tone both matter.
How to Improve Negotiation Skills
Prepare deeply, execute calmly:
Do the homework: Know your must-haves, walk-away points, and levers that actually move the other side.
Build rapport: Trust softens edges. People trade more freely when they feel respected.
Listen for interests: Behind every position is a reason. Solve for that reason.
Craft win–win packages: Trade low-cost, high-value items across issues rather than haggling on one number.
Manage emotions: Keep your cool. Pause if needed. Don’t negotiate hungry or hurried.
Debrief every deal: Capture what worked, what didn’t, and reuse the playbook.
How to Display Negotiation Skills on Your Resume
4. Salesforce
Salesforce is a cloud CRM platform for managing customers, sales, service, marketing, and analytics—all in one ecosystem.
Why It's Important
It centralizes customer data, streamlines processes, and exposes insights that drive revenue and retention. One source of truth, many decisions.
How to Improve Salesforce Skills
Turn the platform into an engine for growth:
Map goals to features: Tie pipeline, retention, and service metrics to objects, fields, and automations.
Customize smartly: Layouts, flows, and validation rules should mirror real workflows—not the other way around.
Integrate key systems: Connect finance, support, and marketing to cut manual work and data gaps.
Guard data quality: Enforce standards, dedupe regularly, and define ownership.
Train and drive adoption: Simple processes, good documentation, ongoing enablement. Usage is the victory.
Leverage analytics: Use dashboards and CRM Analytics (formerly Einstein Analytics) for trending, forecasting, and cohort views.
Audit and iterate: Review fields, automation, and permissions quarterly. Prune what no longer serves.
How to Display Salesforce Skills on Your Resume
5. Project Management
Project management is how you turn plans into finished outcomes—scoping, scheduling, resourcing, executing, and closing with lessons learned.
Why It's Important
It keeps work on time, on budget, and on spec. Less chaos, more delivery.
How to Improve Project Management Skills
Elevate execution and adapt quickly:
Define scope tightly: Goals, deliverables, constraints. Ambiguity is a schedule killer.
Allocate resources: Match skills to tasks, protect focus time, and manage load.
Communicate cadence: Standups, status reports, and decision logs keep everyone aligned.
Use agile where it fits: Iterate, demo often, and welcome change—without losing control.
Manage risk early: Identify, size, and assign owners. Track mitigations like milestones.
Measure what matters: Milestones, velocity, quality metrics—visible and honest.
Close the loop: Postmortems that produce real process tweaks, not just notes.
Adopt the right tools: Use project platforms for planning, tracking, and reporting; automate alerts and handoffs.
How to Display Project Management Skills on Your Resume
6. Strategic Planning
Strategic planning sets direction, translates it into choices, and aligns resources to win—today and next year.
Why It's Important
It creates focus, guides investment, and prepares the business for shocks and shifts. Strategy beats drift.
How to Improve Strategic Planning Skills
Make strategy practical and alive:
Set SMART outcomes: Define success precisely and timebox it.
Engage stakeholders: Cross-functional input reduces blind spots and boosts commitment.
Run a real SWOT: Be brutally honest about strengths and weak links; hunt for asymmetric opportunities.
Stay customer-close: Use interviews, win–loss reviews, and usage data to anchor decisions.
Use data and tech: Forecast with evidence, track leading indicators, and build dashboards that decision-makers actually use.
Review quarterly: Measure progress, pivot when signals change, retire what no longer fits.
How to Display Strategic Planning Skills on Your Resume
7. Team Building
Team building strengthens relationships, clarifies roles, and forges habits that unlock performance. Healthy teams move faster and go farther.
Why It's Important
It boosts trust, improves communication, reduces friction, and lifts results. Morale up, turnover down.
How to Improve Team Building Skills
Shape a team that gels and delivers:
Open up communication: Regular team touchpoints and honest 1:1s. No surprises.
Promote collaboration: Shared goals, clear ownership, and rituals that make handoffs painless.
Make goals visible: Tie individual work to company outcomes so effort feels meaningful.
Recognize often: Celebrate progress, not just finish lines. Recognition multiplies effort.
Invest in development: Workshops, rotations, mentoring—growth fuels engagement.
Lead by example: Show candor, humility, and reliability. People mirror what they see.
How to Display Team Building Skills on Your Resume
8. Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is the workhorse for data analysis, budgeting, modeling, and reporting—fast to set up, powerful in the right hands.
Why It's Important
It enables quick analysis, clear forecasts, and clean reporting so decisions don’t wait.
How to Improve Microsoft Excel Skills
Push beyond the basics:
Master formulas: INDEX/XMATCH, SUMIFS, LET, LAMBDA, and array functions for leaner models.
Own PivotTables: Slice, dice, and summarize without rebuilding sheets.
Visualize well: Charts that tell a story—sparklines, combo charts, conditional formatting.
Automate: Macros, VBA, and Office Scripts to kill repetitive work.
Use Power Query and Power Pivot: Clean, join, and model data at scale with refreshable pipelines.
Stay current: New functions roll out often; fold them into your toolkit.
How to Display Microsoft Excel Skills on Your Resume
9. Problem Solving
Problem solving means cutting through noise to define the real issue, exploring options, and implementing fixes that stick.
Why It's Important
Businesses face novelty every week. Strong problem-solving keeps operations steady and opportunities within reach.
How to Improve Problem Solving Skills
Make it systematic and creative:
Frame the problem: Separate symptoms from causes. Write a sharp problem statement.
Break it down: Use structured thinking (e.g., MECE, fishbone) to find root causes.
Generate options: Invite diverse perspectives; push past the first idea.
Decide with data: Size impact, effort, and risk. Pick the highest return path.
Pilot and learn: Test small, measure, adapt, then scale.
Document and share: Capture learnings so the next fix is faster.
How to Display Problem Solving Skills on Your Resume
10. Risk Management
Risk management identifies, assesses, and prioritizes risks—then treats them to protect objectives and create resilience.
Why It's Important
It shields operations, finances, and reputation while unlocking calculated bets. Fewer surprises, better outcomes.
How to Improve Risk Management Skills
Build a durable system:
Identify comprehensively: Map strategic, financial, operational, compliance, and cyber risks across processes.
Assess clearly: Estimate likelihood and impact; use a risk matrix for shared language.
Prioritize: Focus on high-impact, higher-probability items first. Don’t spread effort thin.
Mitigate smartly: Avoid, reduce, transfer, or accept—pick one deliberately and assign owners.
Monitor continuously: Track indicators, test controls, and refresh registers regularly.
Grow a risk-aware culture: Encourage transparent reporting and reward early escalation.
Leverage tooling: Use platforms and dashboards for real-time tracking and audit trails.
How to Display Risk Management Skills on Your Resume
11. Communication
Communication is the precise transfer of ideas and intent so people understand, align, and act.
Why It's Important
It prevents rework, resolves conflict, and motivates teams. Clear beats clever.
How to Improve Communication Skills
Make every message land:
Listen first: Understand needs and context before you respond.
Be concise: Say the main thing, then stop. Replace jargon with plain words.
Use signals beyond words: Tone, pauses, and body language carry weight.
Invite feedback: Ask for playback to confirm understanding; adjust on the spot.
Adapt to the audience: Executive summaries for leaders, details for owners, stories for customers.
Resolve conflicts directly: Address issues quickly, focus on interests, and document agreements.
Choose the right channel: Async for updates, live for decisions, written for records.
How to Display Communication Skills on Your Resume
12. Time Management
Time management is the craft of prioritizing, sequencing, and protecting effort so the most valuable work gets done—without burning people out.
Why It's Important
It amplifies productivity, reduces stress, and ensures deadlines are met. Focus is a force multiplier.
How to Improve Time Management Skills
Work smarter, deliberately:
Set SMART goals: Tie weekly work to quarterly outcomes.
Prioritize with the Eisenhower Matrix: Important vs. urgent—tackle the strategic before it becomes a fire.
Delegate well: Assign clear outcomes and guardrails; trust, then verify.
Use tools: Calendar blocks, task managers, and automated reminders keep context switching in check.
Batch and block: Group similar tasks and protect deep-work windows.
Review weekly: Inspect your calendar and adjust. Commit to fewer, bigger wins.
How to Display Time Management Skills on Your Resume
