Help With Trish’s Research

And now, you have a chance to help out with Trish’s research.

I’ll use her words to explain:

As most of us know and have experienced, sometimes painfully, sometimes to our benefit, the vast majority of software developers, and indeed these days the majority of professionals in general, work for a manager. Bad managers can frustrate us, decrease the quality and quantity of our work, and lower our job satisfaction. Good managers, when we can find them, can do the opposite – increase the quality and quantity of our professional tasks and make us happier at work. We, as highly autonomous and skilled professionals, tend towards a lack of respect for managers in general, particularly so when our manager is not a member of our profession. Add to that the tangible problems of being managed by someone who has no understanding of your daily tasks, the technical language(s) you speak, your professional values and goals, and what it is, exactly, that you do, and effectively managing professionals becomes fraught with difficulty.

After 10 years as a software developer, my frustration with the seeming inability of managers to manage myself and my colleagues in a way that made our lives easier (as well as a myriad of other problems that seemed endemic to the software industry) led me back to school to earn my PhD in management and begin solving some of these problems. As part of my dissertation research I have developed a list of behaviours that managers can use to create a work environment in which you can work effectively. I am now looking for professionals (software developers, accountants, teachers, professors, physicians, lawyers, etc.) to complete a survey in which I will ask you to rate your current manager on a variety of scales, including leadership style, effectiveness, and professional competence. I’m looking for people whose managers are members of their profession, as well as people whose managers are not members of their profession. The survey will take approximately 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

So, if you’re a professional of some kind, please do the survey. This research may lead to my not going insane in the future.

Even if you can’t or don’t want to, I’d appreciate if you could hit the upvote on this Reddit link, to increase the chance that more people might see the link there.