Would you say, "We have all been working really hard at this point in time, and we are really close. It would be a tragedy to divert our attention to something else and miss making the date we really wanted to"?

Are you going to be your management's man, and say, "Certainly, I'll take care of that! But the Project Hilo delivery will slip"?

It's important to understand that how you respond to this situation may depend on how you view yourself. Are you representing the management, and therefore the organization, to your team, or are you representing your team to the management and the rest of the organization?

Various scenarios can be played out and which one is best-suited will depend on many aspects. Let's list some of those down:

In this one hour conversation, decisions may need to be taken and commitments may need to be made. Commitments will have an impact on you and several team members. Your decision-making skills will be tested. How empowered do you feel to be able to make the decisions?

A seemingly simple situation has many influences and dilemmas. As a manager, you are destined to face these dilemmas on a daily basis. Managerial decision-making depends on more than just the immediate facts of the task at hand. It's the entire gamut of influences that exist in your ecosystem. These influences are created by the organization in general and you in particular. There are so many things a manager is supposed to do.

At different points of the day and each day of the week, you'll end up playing different roles. Let's try to put together a framework for understanding the different managerial roles.

Henry Mintzberg, one of the foremost researchers on management, published a research paper describing the roles of a manager. This was widely acclaimed and added new understanding of managerial work at that point in time.

A manager performs certain ceremonial and symbolic duties. In today's knowledge industry, far fewer ceremonial duties exist, as many of the functions have become automated and self-service through technology portals. Some continue to exist, such as the following:

The manager is the leader of the team. This is a rather large bucket of interpersonal behaviors; multiple behaviors will fall under this category:

A leader is one of the key roles that all managers play in the knowledge industry, and many people believe that this is the primary function of being a manager.

A leader, by definition, leads the way, sets the precedents for the organization, shows the light when the team needs direction, connects with people, and earns their respect so they follow willingly.

A leader nurtures the team and creates a healthy environment for it to prosper and grow.

A manager creates and manages a network of external relationships. This is an extremely important role in today's interconnected world.

There was a time when systems and processes were smaller, simplistic, and independent in nature. Things have changed in the globalized world, where systems are large, complex, and interconnected. Changes in one place have ripple effects in different parts of the system. When your team is connected to the network of dependencies, you may create a change for others or you may be required to respond to a change created by someone else. A manager's liaison abilities will be exercised on every such occasion.

In a software development world, some examples would be:

Interpersonal roles define your interactions with the people who matter to you and your team. As you grow as a manager, the importance of these roles grows even more.

This one is a generally well-understood role. A manager needs to monitor the internal organization as well as gather relevant information from the rest of the organization:

Some managers mistake this to be the primary role and drive through monitoring. They become status managers. Their primary function becomes getting statuses and delivering statuses.

The status meeting becomes the most important meeting of the week. Very soon, most important decisions will be taken during that meeting, as opposed to focused meetings across the week.

Status becomes the driver of work.

Many organizations spend way too much time tracking statuses and building monitoring systems. Current environments of large, complex, and interconnected work makes people worry about statuses too much.

Status, in itself, becomes significant work.

A manager needs to balance the monitoring with the real execution and build the trust that eliminates the need for excessive monitoring.

Much information lands up on the manager's plate for one reason, which is to disseminate, that is, to spread the information. The sources of this information can be internal or external. Some examples of information that a manager disseminates are as follows:

Disseminating information is an extremely important function for managers, as lack of correct information leads to people making assumptions. Inter-dependency in work also requires information to be available, so the alignment between different teams is within an adjustable range.

In today's world of e-mail and internal wikis, it has become much easier to disseminate information. There is often the problem of plenty and multiple sources of information.

One very powerful channel of information that every organization has is that of the grapevine. The grapevine has only become stronger over the years, as people have gotten more connected and information can travel faster. Also, teams are more distributed, which can lead to an information gap that is readily filled by the grapevine.

This has created a new kind of challenge for managers — that of finding a reliable source of information and keeping an adequate flow of information, so that teams don't rely on the grapevine and look towards their managers to get the information.

A manager speaks for the team. This is an important responsibility and a privilege. There are various forums where you speak for your team, delivering the status information, and displaying new achievements or current problems being faced or risks to the deliveries.

The audience includes:

The information processing roles are increasingly becoming more important as the amount of information and the mode of information have changed and has been changing rapidly since the Internet became part of the corporate world.

In the Indian context, this role is very pronounced as the manager is the primary contact point for the teams in other parts of the globe. In many cases, the person on the other side (in the US, Europe, or elsewhere) never really meets or talks to anyone else but the manager of the team.

Being an entrepreneur (manager) doesn't come naturally to most people. In fact, there are several distinctions people make between entrepreneurs and managers.

So, who is an entrepreneur?

By definition, an entrepreneur is someone who believes in a new idea and assumes significant risk to implement that idea.

In business, we would assume that the entrepreneur does that to create new business opportunities by creating a better product or service or provide services with better quality and efficiency.

A manager, being responsible for the business delivery from his organization, has the opportunity to act as an entrepreneur to create new products and improve upon existing products and processes.

For example, you may run a product support organization, where the delivery may be measured by customer issues solved per week. You may already have a set of processes that guide the organization to deliver the service. Improving the processes involved, so that customers get a faster time for resolution and better quality of the solution, would be an entrepreneurial effort.

There's a risk that the manager presumes when new processes or systems will be introduced. The current systems may be negatively impacted. The manager will need to sell the idea and get the buy-in from the top management and his/her own team. The manager will need to develop the idea into one that can be implemented and work with other departments or teams to participate or facilitate.

A manager acts as an entrepreneur to design and create a change in the organization. For example:

Organizations today support and encourage innovation. In our fast moving world, governed by technology, no organization can choose to stay with the old one for too long. It is not the purview of a few to think of improvements. Every manager on the ground can and should be able to improve what they do today by creating new processes and products.

An MNC manager in India has a significant opportunity to be innovative and add new adaptations to the global processes, such that those processes can achieve the objectives and work in the local environment.

Any activity or event that disrupts or can potentially disrupt the normal flow of work can be termed as a disturbance. These can be big, like a political strike that brings down the city to its knees or smaller ones like key people unexpectedly taking a break due to family or medical issues. Disturbances can be long drawn, like the SARS (a deadly virus that spreads in the air from human-to-human) threat that created a fear of travel among people the world over or can be short-lived like key systems not being available.

Many disturbances can be proactively avoided by looking out for them as a matter of routine, and that is one reason why managers build networks and keep an eye on externally connected and dependent components of the system.

However, many of the disturbances show up as fire drills and will knock at the door at just the wrong time. You are expected to just work through those while making sure that impact on the business is as minimal as possible.

Some examples of disturbances are as follows:

Indian managers also get to play this role and manage many disturbances locally. Disturbances in India have their own nature, like political strikes. While you handle disturbances effectively and save any impact on the organization's business, make sure that you report the issue and the resolution to your management chain. Many managers do the hard work of managing the disturbances, but never create any visibility of the same with higher management. Your overseas managers must know the situation on the ground, the resolution, and the fact that you managed it well.

This is another well-understood role. A manager is supposed to manage the allocation of resources to get the best productivity from the team.

Resources are mostly people, but also include hardware, software, network, help with expertise, and of course money.

A primary function and a role of the manager is to optimally deploy the available resources to deliver the results:

With the work becoming people-centric, the negotiator role is a key role to be played. Unlike machines, people seldom take exactly what is given to them. They either want more or want less. How much more or less given depends on the negotiation skills of the two parties.

Negotiation is an important art, as it impacts more than one person. If one person negotiates to get less work, the others will have to bear it. If one person negotiates to get more rewards, there will be less to go around for all the others.

Hence, although negotiation is a one-on-one activity, it must be viewed in the larger context of the team. A manager usually will:

Negotiation should be distinguished from haggling or having your way. Negotiating with your management is not the same as negotiating with someone outside the organization. Don't keep pressing too hard to get your way. You may succeed a few times, but your manager may figure out your disposition and may block you out later in further situations, expecting a hard negotiation.