Benefits And Challenges Of Self-Management
Self-management is still a fairly new practice in the startup and corporate world. It requires quite a bit of courage and readiness to challenge the status quo in order to implement. More and more leaders are comfortable with creating independent, self-managing teams though where these practices can be tested with a view of potential implementation across the company. There are multiple benefits, as well as some challenges, connected to self-management. I’ve attempted to list the key ones below to help those considering bringing this type of setup into their companies.
Benefits:
Less toll on company/team leaders since the pressures connected to being a manager is now distributed across the organisation.
Increased growth opportunity for those who self-manage. Out of necessity individuals need to step up in their maturity as they are trusted with this responsibility.
Self-management is also connected to people’s greater sense of ownership of their work. Since they are responsible for evaluating their own performance, they often become more dedicated to meeting goals and KPIs they set for themselves. Particularly if self-evaluation - as the case is at GrantTree - links to self-set pay and becomes the basis for pay increases.
Overall company culture transforms and evolves as more people within it self-manage. People take responsibility for things such as disagreements with colleagues instead of counting on their managers. Levels of self-awareness and maturity across the company increase.
Better and quicker decision-making - you don’t need to go through fifteen layers of management in order to reach a conclusion on an issue. Also, decisions tend to be better when made by those directly affected by them.
Higher employee retention because jobs which involve self-management are more interesting.
It’s easier to attract candidates (although arguably harder to actually hire the right people). A lot of individuals on the job market today are interested in self-management, even if not many know how to do it well.
Potential cost saving as you don’t need to hire individuals whose only job is to manage people. Arguably, this is replaced by a percentage of each individual’s time and salary going towards self-management which can amount to a similar expense overall.
Challenges:
In order to do well with a self-managing setup, you need more mature people who are difficult to hire. It’s all about introducing the right recruitment process which I talk about in another post.
Self-management can feel chaotic to people unless appropriate structures are in place to inform and guide them. This could include monthly self-assessments, guidance on how to evaluate your own performance, and more.
This type of setup is demanding on the leaders - not getting involved in decision making requires a level of security and trust in people which can take leaders a while to develop.
It may appear that there are more conflicts on the team as disagreements tend to rise to the surface quicker. Hopefully, those will be resolved by self-managing individuals themselves though.
Sometimes stupid decisions get made, naturally, no one makes good decisions a hundred percent of the time. Potentially more mistakes get made when people self-manage as opposed to being managed, particularly when they’re still learning to do so. This can be a good thing if your culture encourages making mistakes as the best way to learn and grow.
I hope this has given you a flavour of the upsides of self-management as well as things to look out for as potential challenges. Overall, in my view at least, benefits outweigh the drawbacks. I look forward to seeing more and more companies implement self-managing principles on their team all across the world as it will result in people getting more growth and satisfaction from their jobs.
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