Manager Support Needs Profile for Employees, New Starters and the People Who Manage ThemYour manager is guessing. This is the page that stops them.

Methodology: Forty-one original exercises across five formats: twenty self-report ratings on a six-point scale carrying four support needs at five statements each with the keying balanced, eight keyed single-choice exercises, five select-every-that-applies exercises, four binary claims and four matching exercises. Two response instructions are declared and the two strands are reported apart. The rating strand carries a behavioural-tendency instruction - what is like you - and has no right answers at all. The twenty-one keyed exercises carry a knowledge instruction - what is most likely to be true, or most useful - and they measure reading somebody else's needs and turning your own into an actionable request. The two are never averaged, because a preference and a competence are different kinds of fact and a single number over them would be neither. Construct statement: it measures which of four legitimate support needs a person reaches for first - direction set up front, room to choose the method, short regular contact, and the wider picture behind the work - and, separately, how well they read those needs in other people and how actionably they can ask for their own. It does not measure personality, ability, conscientiousness, commitment, how easy somebody is to work with, whether they are good at their job, or whether they should be promoted. A high need for direction is not low capability and the report says so on the page rather than in a footnote. Scoring is a within-person centred style profile. Each need is scored on its own balanced-keyed items, and the respondent's OWN mean across the four needs is then subtracted, so the four centred figures sum to zero by construction. Elevation and acquiescence drop out for free, exactly as they do in a correlation match, without needing a key vector to correlate against - two people who reach for the same thing first produce the same profile whether one of them agrees with everything and the other agrees with nothing. Two consequences are printed rather than left to be inferred: being high on all four is impossible, and five items per need is a PLACEMENT rather than a number, so no need carries a score or a percentile. The flatness check runs on the RAW pressed values and never on the centred or reverse-keyed ones, because a respondent pressing the same button throughout still produces a centred profile with a shape and that shape would be entirely the authoring. The keyed strand is corrected against an authored answer prior per option rather than against a uniform draw. Reliability is McDonald's omega estimated from item count and a stated assumed inter-item correlation, printed with what it permits; where it will not carry a number the refusal is printed. Constructs and sources: leader-member exchange and the finding that a manager's relationship differs by report rather than being uniform (Graen and Uhl-Bien 1995); the job demands-resources model and support as a resource rather than a personal deficit (Bakker and Demerouti 2007); self-determination theory on autonomy, competence and relatedness as distinct needs (Deci and Ryan 2000); need for structure as a stable individual difference unrelated to ability (Neuberg and Newsom 1993); feedback-seeking behaviour and its cost to the seeker (Ashford and Cummings 1983); the specificity requirement in feedback and in requests (Locke and Latham 2002); onboarding, information-seeking and newcomer sense-making (Morrison 1993); ipsative and within-person centring as a control for elevation and acquiescence (Cronbach and Gleser 1953; Fisher 2004); acquiescence and balanced keying (Baumgartner and Steenkamp 2001); the Barnum effect and why a profile that names only attractive things reads as a horoscope (Forer 1949); and two-audience score reporting from a single data structure (Zenisky and Hambleton 2012). All items are original works. No commercial personality instrument, behavioural-style vocabulary, type code, strengths list, reference profile or report layout is reproduced or implied, and no affiliation with any assessment publisher exists or is claimed.