Self management certainly has its place and time in the right context. The value of self management over command and control is not disputable. This having been said, self management is often promulgated as an ugly manipulation. One fable will suffice.
The fable
Paul heads a team of 50 top notch developers based in Tel Aviv for US based company selling software for public electrical and water utilities worldwide. Paul’s team is overwhelmed due to the massive amount change requests flooding his team.
Clients are supposed to funnel their change requests via Change Request Management, which is part of the Product Management group based in New Zealand.
However, the Product Management/Change management group lacks technical knowledge, and so clients often turn directly to Paul or to the developers themselves for changes.
Alternatively, changes are requested via Sales, who have no problem forwarding these requests to Paul, ccing the CEO.
Paul has asked that Change Management acquire more technical skills in order to serve as a better filter. This however is too expensive to execute since it would mean hiring engineers to replace the present set of administrators, who serve as change managers.
Paul then asked for more staff, in order to build a technical change management team in Tel Aviv, through which priorities can be set. His request was put off till 2017 budget talks in November.
When the level of client bitching got out of control, the CEO summoned Paul to a meeting with EVP HR, a certain Gloria Ramsbottom. A decision was made that the developers “become better aligned with the principles of self-management”. A training vendor “specializing” in self-management was hired and a webinar on the virtues of self-management was commissioned.
The moral
Self-management can be used by management as a cop out to abscond from their responsibility of setting priorities and applying more resources. Self-management, when applied in this manner, is a manipulation of the more evil ilk, exploiting the very people who need to be assisted.