What are the tasks of a Professional Manager?

As a reader of this article you are either a practicing manager or are aspiring to be one. Your, first concern, therefore, is to know the tasks which you are expected to fulfill as a professional manager. These various tasks are discussed in this unit.

There is a lot of confusion over the much widely used terms-professional management and professional managers. Some researchers contend there is nothing like professional management. Management is a discipline. There are practitioners of this discipline who practice management as a profession and 'thus are, professional managers. Just as there are doctors and lawyers by profession similarly there are professional managers. As doctors practice medicine, managers practice management.

The only difference between professional managers and other professionals is that, while the latter must possess a formal degree in their discipline, a professional manager need not have a formal degree or education in management. He may have learnt the necessary skills and gained competence from his experience. The second characteristic of a professional manager is that his primary concern is the organisation or the company with which he works. This is true whether the manager works for a private or public sector or a multinational company; whether he is the executive director or the personnel manager reporting to the executive director. The professional manager always has his company's overall perspective in his mind and all his actions are guided by the company's objectives.

The third and the most important characteristic of a professional manager is that he is responsible for performance. Managing involves collecting and utilizing resources (money, men, materials and machines) in. the most optimal manner for achievement of some pre-determined objectives or results. It is the professional manager's responsibility to utilize resources to produce the required results. Responsibility and performance are really the key words in defining a manager's role. Performance implies action, and action necessitates taking specific steps and doing certain tasks. Let us first take up the various tasks which a manager is expected to do to produce results.

Tasks of a Professional Manager

1. Providing Purposeful Direction to the Firm
2. Managing Survival and Growth
3. Maintaining Firm's Efficiency In Terms of Profit Generation
4. Meeting the Challenge of Increasing Competition
5. Managing for Innovation
6. Building Human Organisation
7. Retaining Talent and Inculcating Sense of Loyalty
8. Sustaining Leadership Effectiveness
9. Maintaining Balance between Creativity and Conformity
10. Postponing Managerial Obsolescence
11. Meeting the Challenge of Change
12. Coping With Growing Technological Sophistication
13. Coping with Growing Public Critics and Political Opposition-Both Objective and Irrational
14. Coping with Increasing Levels of Aspiration
15. Maintaining Relations with Various Society Segments

The specific tasks which a manager has to perform flow out of his job description. The tasks may vary depending upon the managerial level, function and industry to which the manager belongs. In this unit we have discussed an exhaustive list of tasks which every manager has to perform. It is possible that you may not be performing all the tasks described here but confining yourself to only a few. Also, some tasks may be of greater importance than others.

Given the wide range of diverse tasks which a manager is called upon to perform it is essential that the manager be a thinker, a doer and a people-oriented man all rolled into one. However, it is rare that you find a manager who has the ideal combination of all three dimensions in equal parts. To be effective you must recognize your strong dimension and look for an opening where your strength can be best utilized.