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When you start talking about self-management in any organizational context, you instantly run into some big questions that make a lot of people uncomfortable. Most organizations are set up as a hierarchy. There are defined leaders, and those leaders make the decisions. The rest of the people, from middle management to rank-and-file, execute on the work associated with those decisions.
Well, at least that’s how it used to ideally work.
Digital tools, globalization, cost structures, and shifting human mentality changed a lot of this. For example, in most companies right now, there’s no need for middle management anymore. Why does it still exist, then? Because change is hard. Self-management emerged as an idea for several different reasons. One was the management buzzword term of the year back in 2012, i.e. holacracy. Almost every experiment with holacracy has been an abject train wreck, which should probably teach us something about self-management.
Problem is, most lazy journalism clings to these ideas about how different millennials are going to be. Almost none of these ideas are definitively right, but we can’t get enough of the narrative. Let’s be clear on one thing, though: the only major difference between a 25 year-old now and a 25 year-old in 1963 is the amount of information available to them in their pocket. The mindset is very…
