Being a Manager
Rakesh Sharma was good at sales. He relished interacting with customers and the thrill of finishing a
sale was a big motivator. He sold credit cards to bank customers and in a couple of years
outperformed his sales colleagues and was routinely exceeding the sales target set for him. In
recognition of this achievement, the bank decided to promote him to the management cadre. Rakesh
Sharma had become a sales manager. Managerial life, he thought, would be exciting. It did get exciting
but not for the reasons he thought.
Though he had become a manager the attraction of making and closing a sale had a strong grip on his
behavior. In many instances, when Rakesh observed that the salesmen were not ‘pushing enough’, he
took over their role and proceeded to clinch the sale. Salesmen did not like this behavior and called
it interference, some even openly. But Rakesh told them that he was experienced in selling and
anyway the Bank had sold one more card, he pointed out. However, Rakesh did see a ripple of
discontentment spread through his team.
In contrast to the earlier salesman's role, Rakesh realized that manager’s work was never-ending and
more complex. It required capabilities like reflection, analysis and structured thinking. Soon, Rakesh
realized that what he thought would be a dream was slowly turning into a nightmare. For instance,
the Bank’s Chief Marketing Manager had asked him for a proposal to launch new advertising
initiatives for the card. He put down his ideas in the form of bullet points and sent it off. A few days
later he received a reply questioning every point he had made. The major criticism was that Rakesh’s
points lacked data on sales, forecast for next year and complete absence of competitor moves. Putting
this together was more difficult than he thought. He had to carry work home. Similarly, there had
been a demand from his sales team to recruit two more salespersons. Rakesh wrote a brief mail to
HR department expressing the need for two more personnel. The reply from the HR department
questioned his demand and wanted justification. The reply referred to budgets, sales figures, sales
per person and other metrics that Rakesh had never heard about.
On many occasions, important emails to him went unanswered. One was from the HR department
asking him to recommend a training program for his team. Though he wanted to answer it he realized
that he did not have any idea about the training needs of his team. And in a while, he completely
forgot about the mail. On some days, few salesmen had not come to work, and when questioned they
said they had sent a mail to him a few days back. But, it appears Rakesh had completely missed it. In
another instance, he was interacting with a customer (as usual pushing aside the salesperson), when
he was reminded that he had missed a simple ceremony in his office that was organized to award to
high-performing sales trainees. Rakesh shrugged his shoulders and asked whether that ceremony
was more important than the customer.
Rakesh’s annual review was coming up shortly and when he was preparing for it he did realize that
being a manager did not seem as exciting and productive as being a salesperson. Or was he missing
something? He wanted to talk to someone who could shed some light on this black-box called
manager. Someone who could be his mentor.
If you were his mentor what would you say to Rakesh on being a manager?
This case was prepared by Prof. S Raghu Raman and is intended to be used as a basis for class discussion.
