Are you a Professional Manager?

We often hear the term, ‘Professional Manager’ used in the industry. Those using it are surely honest in their intentions but like many things in our lives, maybe taking for granted that the other guy takes home the meaning the same way as the user intends. If the intended communication was so easy to execute, the Brits would not have come out with the word, semantics – an apology for the rampant misunderstanding in communication between two individuals despite the best of intent on either side.

Rarely do we hear someone saying, ‘I am a Professional Manager’. It is rather common to hear a senior manager harkening their junior, ‘You know what, you need to become a professional manager’. The junior rarely gets the chance to ask what the senior exactly means by that. Mostly, the context determines what the speaker meant and what the listener should understand. In general, the junior may not have performed as per the expectations of the senior. Therefore, the junior would have become a professional manager if only he/she met the expectations of the senior.

Lo & behold, is that all required to become a Professional Manager?

Well, it does not sound that convincing if you are neither the senior or the junior living the unique context these two managers are supposed to be managing in some company out there in the world of management.

If you are in the profession of be(com)ing managers, it may be interesting to dig a bit deeper into these two words used sporadically in our lives as managers…

Profession

The Cambridge dictionary defines it as ‘any type of work that needs special training or a particular skill, often one that is respected because it involves a high level of education’

Merriam-Webster elaborates further, ‘a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation; a vocation, or employment; the whole body of persons engaged in a calling’.

Did you receive specialised knowledge, training, or a high level of education to perform as Managers?

Does the body of persons engaged in management feel it as a principal calling, a vocation?

The entire brood of managers the world over received specialised knowledge about some branch of technology, finance, or economics in their core education domain before they started to work in a company. Many survived the rigours of getting admitted to a pricey MBA program to learn about tried and tested systems & processes in one function or another by reading up case studies in the wee hours, on what had gone wrong or right in some company in the past. All that teaches anybody about a generic business as a template but alas, none receive any training or high level of education about how to become professional managers.

Let us look into the next word used more often than muscles in our lives, Manager.

Manager

All young, educated individuals await eagerly for the word Manager to get added to their job title.

Normally that takes some years in the functional domain they start their careers in. They gain expertise about the skills, tools, processes, systems, practices, and a wardrobe of explicit knowledge pertaining to the domain. By the time, they absorb all that, a rare few even come to resent becoming managers as they realise that once they become big managers, they would not be able to practice what they learnt over years about the said domain and leave all that to their juniors.

What they see their top managers busy doing hardly reflects anything related to all the domain knowledge they laboriously amassed over the years.

So, what is a manager all about?

Merriam-Webster makes life complicated by defining the word as, ‘a person who conducts business or household affairs; a person whose work or profession is management’.

To me, it sounds like a practice that I could learn about only when I am in the practice. It sounds akin to what a friend told me when I was doubtful about being able to learn swimming. She said, ‘you have to jump into the water to learn about swimming’. Quite similar to what life taught us about becoming a good parent. First, we need to become a parent. Period!

I hoped the Cambridge would be kinder. It said, ‘the Manager is responsible for managing an organization; someone whose job is to control or organize someone or something, esp. a business’

I can’t help but refer to one of the few living Gurus on Management, Henry Mintzberg (was lucky to be his student couple of decades back). Henry launched a broadside on the topic of management way back in the seventies with his research and an HBR article rated as a classic till date (HBR July–August 1975. It won the McKinsey Award for excellence then). To quote:

‘What, exactly, does a manager do? it’s difficult to say. The textbook answer used to be: plan, organize, coordinate, and control. But down in the trenches, the manager’s job has always been far more complicated. In fact, you play so many roles, it’s hard to excel at any one. The pressures of the job can drive you to:

• Take on too much work
• Operate with constant interruptions
• Respond prematurely to complex events
• Act rather than think or
• Make decisions without seeing the big picture

His illustration below may communicate a lot about a Manager’s job even today – after half a century!

To become a professional Manager today, do you have the specialised knowledge, training or academic preparation on how to perform the best in the above roles or even more like ‘Decision Executioners’?

Hasn’t the Manager’s job become more complex with rampant changes owing to Work-life-post-Covid, omnipresence of social media and an onslaught of digitisation (to cite a few disruptors)?

The answer lies where it did even 50 years ago, in Coaching. Senior Managers need to coach their juniors. If your senior managers are reticent about coaching, scoot and find someone who is willing to coach you.

Why Coaching, not Training?

You can train or get trained on established skills or practices. Training is about explicit knowledge that holds firm despite changes in context. A look at Henry’s graphic above and what more you could add to it would tell you that the knowledge required for a manager’s job is not about anything explicit as every manager must handle different contexts more than few times a day. A manager’s daily job is largely about managing other people and not processes, systems or tools that have been put in place for an ongoing business context. People are not machines and hence there is nothing standard or explicit about them. Managing people including yourself is about tacit knowledge that can be gained only through experiencing, developed over time through the practice of management.

Who you are as an Individual and how you accept yourself, changes the way you manage yourself or may manage others. Hence, management cannot be learnt from past case studies!

Gaining tacit knowledge is more akin to the learning, Shishyas absorbed by observing their Gurus over years in the age-old Gurukul system in India. It is learning through seeing, feeling, interpreting, finding your conviction, and practicing yourself in your own context that you must manage. At the end, management is not a science that can be taught to scores of students sitting in a classroom. It is rather an art that is personalised by the manager and starts with knowing and accepting your own self. That is where coaching begins. A good coach never tells you what you should do but puts questions in your mind that you find the answers for.

It is a bit like Indian philosophy, never telling you what is right or wrong, to fulfil this or that expectation. It pushes and prods you to find out your own truth, your own calling and continue the journey of your choice. If you wish to be a professional manager, do find your own calling and the passion to march on beyond expectations…