Two major health crisis of today's world are antimicrobial drug resistance and type II diabetes. To tackle them, there is an immediate requirement for the development of new and safer drugs and the present work is one such quest for novel and efficient drug candidates. We have developed three trace metal coordination compounds tethered with a reduced salen ligand {H(hpdbal)-an} (L), namely, a manganese-salan complex, [Mn(HO){(hpdbal)-an}] (1), a nickel-salan complex, [Ni{(hpdbal)-an}] (2) and a copper-salan complex, [Cu{(hpdbal)-an}] (3). The compounds were characterized by elemental analysis, vibrational spectroscopy, electronic spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, nuclear magnetic resonance and electron-paramagnetic resonance techniques. The compounds were evaluated for antimicrobial activity against seven pathogens (Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans) and antidiabetic activity by mimicking diabetic environment on the immortal human liver cancer cells, HepG2. Complexes 1 and 2 were additionally tested for their reactivity and stability in biological media mimic conditions. The nickel(II) salan complex (2) exhibited noteworthy antifungal activity against Candida albicans and the manganese(II) salan complex (1) induced increased glucose uptake by the insulin resistant cells. Both compounds were found to be stable when solution pH conditions were varied from 3 to 9. They exhibited strong affinity of binding towards a carrier protein, bovine serum albumin which was evaluated with the aid of multi-spectroscopic techniques.