The manager of today is expected to bring order out of chaos. S / he has to create a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. A truly effective manager is one who obtains knowledge and skills in management and continuously develops his / her managerial competence through critical observation.

Thus, the work performance of a manager depends sequentially on competence, confidence and commitment. Overall s / he should excel in everything s / he does or attempts.

Thus excellence in everything one does is the minimum requirement in these days of heightened competition. Only this excellence factor differentiates `men' from a herd of boys, as they stand out tall. This excellence does not come over night. Over years of strenuous exercise and after much thought and deliberation one gets a glimpse of excellence in his / her endeavours.

As Dr.Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, Former President of India puts it succinctly in a totally different context, truth is nothing but distilled experiences and wisdom is in turn nothing but distilled truth. And this can be extended to define and draw excellence as nothing but distilled personal wisdom gained over a period of time in successfully encountering major challenges in one's official life and personal life.

Of course, the challenges can be squarely met only with competence, confidence and commitment.

Thus, the three things that can ensure our manager a safe passage into excellence state are competence, confidence and commitment.

The competence ensures that our manager has the capability to contribute, ability to outperform, and skills to withstand critical situations, fitness to play higher roles when required and aptitude to accept risky propositions challengingly.

The confidence part will enable our manager to tackle any critical situation with ease and come out successful. Most of the times, managers who are rated capable fail in their assignments because they lacked self confidence in the first place! Confidence will catapult our manager into performance mode easily.

Well. The one ingredient that is required for a manager to reach the zenith of excellence is commitment. Mere combination of competence and confidence alone will not enable the manager in his / her mission if s / he does not show required commitment. Absolute commitment will lead to absolute success. Without commitment, the efforts of our manager will be half hearted and naturally total success cannot be achieved with such half hearted attempts.

As our managers are all in great hurry, the best way to pursue excellence is that our manager could acquire competency first. This competency will result in our manager’s comfort level going up in his/her assignment thereby enhancing his / her self confidence. Thereafter s / he needs only to top it up with total commitment.

Hence the perfect combination of competency, confidence and commitment will propel our manager to sure excellence.