Discuss various tasks of a professional manager.

Discuss various tasks of a professional manager. Describe the survival and growth options which your organization has adopted or any organization you are familiar with. Describe the organization you are referring to.


1 Answer. The concept of professional management has become synonym of progressive and efficient management and since no one likes to be backward an inefficient.

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. A professional managers main concern is the organization or the company with which he works. A professional manager always has his company’s overall perspective in mind and all his actions are guided by the objectives of the company. Moreover, a professional manager is responsible for p[performance.

Some Tasks of a Professional Manager
Providing direction to the firm: The first task, envisioning goals, is one of the tasks that should never be delegated. This is the ability to define overarching goals that serve to unify people and focus energies. It’s about effectively declaring what’s possible for the team to achieve and compelling them to accomplish more than they ever thought possible.

Managing survival and growth: Ensuring survival of the firm is a critical task of a manager. The manager must also seek growth. Two sets of factors impinge upon the firm’s survival and growth. The first is the set of factors which are internal to the firm and are largely controllable. These internal factors are choice of technology, efficiency of labour, competence of managerial staff, company image, financial resources, etc. The second set of factors are external to the firm like government policy, laws and regulations, changing customer tastes, attitudes and values, increasing competition, etc.

Maintaining firm’s efficiency: A manager has not only to perform and produce results, but to do so in the most efficient manner. The more output a manager can produce with the same input, the greater will be the profit.

Meeting the competition challenge: A manager must anticipate and prepare for the increasing competition. Competition is increasing in terms of more producers, products, better quality, etc.

Innovation: To plan and manage for innovation is an on-going task of a manager.

Building Human Organization: Man is by far the most critical resource of an organization. A good worker is a valuable asset to any company. Every manager must constantly look out for people with potential and attract them to join the company.

Leadership: Organizational success is determined by the quality of leadership that is exhibited. "A leader can be a manager, but a manager is not necessarily a leader," says Gemmy Allen (1998). Leadership is the power of persuasion of one person over others to inspire actions towards achieving the goals of the company. Those in the leadership role must be able to influence/motivate workers to an elevated goal and direct themselves to the duties or responsibilities assigned during the planning process. Leadership involves the interpersonal characteristic of a manager's position that includes communication and close contact with team members. The only way a manager can be acknowledged as a leader is by continually demonstrating his abilities.
Change management: A very important task which every manager has to perform is that of a change agent. It’s the managers task to ensure that the change is introduced and incorporated in a smooth manner with the least disturbance and resistance.

Selection Information technology: Today’s managers are faced with a bewildering array of information technology choices that promise to change the way work gets done. Computers, the Internet, intranets, telecommunications, and a seemingly infinite range of software applications confront the modern manager with the challenge of using the best technology.

Example: Global Auto Manufacturer
My company needed to transform its supply chain into a strategic asset for competitive survival and growth.

The company suffered from lack of focus on retail sales. Production drove sales: dealers were allocated vehicles and told to sell them, and sales and marketing had limited ability to influence volume or mix of vehicles in production.

Inventory represented a major drag on the company's balance sheet. Lead times between order and delivery exceeded 100 days. Global shipments of components and finished goods caused significant lead-time variability. Together these factors led to inventory that was 30% higher than that of key competitors.

Successfully changing this under-performing supply chain into a lean, market-focused asset was absolutely essential.

My company hired Coplenish professionals. They used Collaborative solutions approach to solve the problem.


Collaborative solutions approach
Coplenish professionals led client teams of marketing, sales, manufacturing and information technology personnel to reduce costs and inventory by improving the quality and speed of the information supply chain.

This required substantial change in the working relationships between retail dealers, sales and marketing and production. Substantially more effective collaboration and communication was required to make retail demand the driver of the supply chain. In addition, physical process flows needed to be reexamined and changed to speed up cycle times and reduce variability.

The team changed the way the dealers and the manufacturer worked together and changed how the functional silos within the manufacturer worked together.





The team developed an online system for dealers to provide annual sales plans that showed their projections of sales by model by month.

In addition to the ordering system, the team rolled out an online auction system so that the dealers could bid on excess production vehicles, off lease vehicles and damaged vehicles creating market based pricing, instead of mass incentives, for these lower demand vehicles.
Results of implementation
• Inventory has been reduced significantly
• Logistics costs have been reduced by $13 million
• Dealer order to delivery lead times have been reduced from over 100 days to 40 days
• Volume and mix are now changeable on monthly basis
• Final specification freeze is down to 10 days from three months
• Flexibility to make production plan changes is now based on component availability rather than arbitrary, fixed percentages
• Daily changes to color and destination are now supported up to six days prior to production