What’s the benefit: A personal story of a researching manager?

Management research is constantly confronted with the question of whether or not it has relevance for practice. One possible way of ensuring relevance of research is to transfer and apply knowledge in practice. To that end, I seek to explore this topic drawing on my double role as researcher-practitioner. In particular, I address this topic from the manager’s perspective. I am interested in how and what did the manager in me learn from and by doing research on my own environment.However, it is not sufficient to demonstrate the possible benefits of this double role, but one must also show the double role’s downsides. For me being a manager of a construction company is a full-time job; being a doctoral researcher is a full-time job too. It is demanding and sometimes exhausting but how rewarding is it to be both?Therefore, I reflect on my personal experiences over the last four years being an auto-ethnographer and manager at the same time. Hence, I seek to contribute to the debate about the relevance of research for practice by providing an example in place. In particular, I am going to focus on how I learned as a manager, how my approach to management and my managerial practice changed over the course of my doctoral research. Using examples from my research, I seek to demonstrate how I transferred insights gained while doing research on my practice of managing a construction company, what challenges I faced and what benefits I gained. In doing so, I try to highlight, what opportunities auto-ethnographic research might provide for practitioners like me and whether seen from a practitioner’s perspective it is worth the effort. Therefore, this reflective account is going to be close to managerial practice in the construction industry.