[wayoutthere]

I look at it as being situational. Sometimes you end up with a team whose natural styles all mesh and they don’t need much leadership. Self-organization is great here; a manager’s role should be to give advice and deal with corporate politics (IMO the politics/budget angles are the difference between a principal/staff engineer and a manager).

Other times you get teams whose working styles are very far apart and have a hard time finding common ground. In the latter case, self-organization leads to communication breakdowns; so you have to force some organization on the team.

Ideally you would just hire a team with a diverse but complementary set of skills, but you go to war with the army you have.

[skeeter2020]

Also, although managers appear to work for a team or specific area, they usually interface across many or all in a department. The self organizing team will usually do so as if they are completely independent which is rarely true, so they need to organize within constraints of which they are totally unaware. Example: getting a different team to priortize work upon which your team depends will involve larger development plans, product management and the "politics" you reference. I've never met a technical lead who wants to do this and few who are good at it. This is a good thing.