Self-management has become a widespread phenomenon in many organisations. It is very much about giving employees the freedom to organise their own workday and prioritise their tasks. Some studies have also shown that self-management has become a significant motivational factor for employees.
Even though employees are largely able to structure their workday themselves, this doesn't mean that the need for managers and middle managers has disappeared. Quite the opposite. However, the demands on managers have changed.
Set the framework for employee empowerment
As a manager, you need to set the framework within which employees are expected to work. This framework should help employees prioritise their tasks and set them on the right path towards the company's overall goals and results.
Within this framework, employees should be able to prioritise their own tasks. In order for employees to manage themselves, they need to know the company's goals and be able to delineate and prioritise their tasks.
It's also important that employees know when they have successfully completed one or more tasks and that they are able to evaluate their own performance. As a manager, you need to ensure that the framework for employees' work is clearly communicated, as well as what it takes for an employee to be successful.
Self-management creates motivated employees
As mentioned earlier, self-management has become an important motivational factor for many employees. Employees feel that they are given responsibility and will therefore be more committed to making a task succeed and be successful. As a result, employees also take greater ownership of achieving their own and the organisation's goals.
As a manager, you'll also find that self-managing employees live the company's values to a much higher degree. Of course, for this to succeed, the manager must have made the company's values, strategy, goals, guidelines, etc. clear to the employees.
However, there is also a risk in allowing employees to be self-managing. Today, with many employees taking their work computers and phones home with them, many employees find it difficult to put work aside. It could also be that an employee finds it difficult to prioritise their tasks and therefore feels under pressure.
In both cases, there is a risk that one or more employees will experience stress as a result of self-management. Here, it's the manager's role to help the employee on the right path and help prioritise tasks if that's what the employee needs.
Become a better leader for the self-managing employee
As a manager of self-managing employees, it's your job to communicate the company's goals and results so that employees can prioritise their tasks correctly. Therefore, you also need to articulate the organisation's strategy: what is the purpose of the tasks, what is the goal, how should the tasks be solved and so on.
It's all about creating a common understanding among all employees, as this will help ensure that all employees are working towards the same goal.
If you want to be an even better leader to your self-managing employees, we have a number of tools to help you:
- Person analyses
- Sales Competence Assessment
- Tutorial Profile
- Situational Leadership
With persona analyses and Sales Competence Assessment, you gain insight into your employees' strengths and development opportunities. Situational Leadership provides a range of tools that can help you target your leadership style to the competence level of the recipients and the situation at hand.
If you have questions about how you can actively utilise our various solutions as a manager - and not least as a manager of self-managing employees, please contact us. Call us at 70 26 32 25 or send an email to info@hrsolutions.dk.
English 
Danish 
Norwegian