But you have that in the Templar Grand Master.
The specific purpose of the Elector Count is to provide leadership. If you want something more pick another character.
This would be great advice if I needed some pointers in how to build an empire armylist, but we're not talking about tactica here. We're talking about how to change the Empire army for the better.
When designing a game like Warhammer, one solid approach is to determine a baseline level of effectiveness. Once such has been established, one can deviate from this baseline by adding in unique advantages balanced by weaknesses. In the situation of the imperial general, the baseline has been deviated by giving him weaker stats, but no matching advantage has been added to balance out this weakness. To me, that's bad game design.
His low price could hardly be considered an advantage. This character selection is virtually identical in price to the Mercenary General, a largely similar character choice. Likewise is he similar in price to the skaven warlord, another character that plays a very similar role to the imperial general. While their costs remain similar, the non imperial generals mentioned here all have baseline lord stats, while the imperial general's stats are diminished with seemingly no reason.
Not even his ability to bestow a magical banner upon a single unit could be considered an advantage. Almost every other army in the game already gets this power for free. Core and special units across many armybooks naturally have the ability to take a magic banner, and they don't have to take a specific character to do it. If anything, this ability could be considered as yet another army weakness or disadvantage that is without a matching advantage.
If we are going to do a critical review and revision of the empire armybook, I definitely feel that we should be working from an even baseline. We should not try remaking the imperial general based on where he currently is (a character with his stats lowered for little reason) but should instead revise him with an eye to where he should be. At his heart, he is your basic lord level character in an army that is the force in which other armies are contrasted.
That said, I also think the Grand Master is a largely redundant special choice that we don't need (being essentially a standard lord level character with a morale boosting ability), but I'll save that for a future thread.