Delegation is among the most challenging points in leadership when working with teams. The quality of our professional lives and the quality of our team members can depend on delegation. Delegation is a huge topic I often train people on for a day or two. But before we learn delegation skills, we must understand the core of delegation and the WHY.
As in everything we do, some polarity always exists. The polarity anomaly is the dilemma of team members and team leaders.
Team leaders might ask themselves:
1) Can delegating people take some of my power?
Or polarity:
2) Am I delegating too much?
From a team member’s side, we can assume two questions:
1) Does the delegated task require additional work for me?
Or polarity:
2) I am so isolated that every task for my development is delegated.
When I first played the delegation poker game long ago, I never guessed that this simple exercise could change how I see delegation. Delegation Poker is the perfect tool from Mng 3.0 to clarify who’s responsible for what and to what level.
I ran a workshop on the topic of leadership, and I used a delegation poker game as an easy way to explain delegation to the attendees. With more than twenty new leaders, I thought it would be perfect timing.
I asked attendees to bring up some situations from leaders’ daily tasks for which leaders were confused; at which level should their responsibility for this task be?
I shortly explained the meaning of every different card, then split the group into five groups of four.

The set has seven different cards representing seven different levels of delegation.

1. Tell: I will tell them.
   The leader will tell to the team members what to do.
2. Sell: I will try and sell it to them.
   The leader will try to explain the purpose of why they are doing something (that the leader told them to do)
3. Consult: I will consult and then decide
   The leader will ask for opinions but still decide on their own.
4. Agree: We will agree together
   This is the start of the real conversation for the team.
5. Advise: I will advise, but they decide
   Now, the power is attributed to the team members, and their word is final, with advice from the leader. This is the perfect example of the Agile leadership principle: Let them fail.
6. Inquire: I will inquire after they decide
   The leader will do what the team decides.
7. Delegate: I will fully delegate
   The task is your team, so start from scratch and finish independently.

I presented the first case and asked people to think and discuss with each other at which level they think they should be. In every group, one was a leader, and the others were team members. I gave them five minutes to discuss and agree on this task’s level of delegation. The group should discuss together and choose the level. One person, a “leader,” will think on their own

After five minutes of discussion, I asked all groups to give me the card (the number), and I took cards from “leaders.” I put all those cards on the delegation board.

Wow, such different views are from the “leaders” and “team members” sides. Even attendees were confused because they had the opportunity to get in someone’s shoes and understand the differences in delegation.

The situation was the same case by case.

Some of the cases were:

Some of the cases were:

• Should we work on Friday?
• Who will arrange the holiday priorities?
• Who will handle the issue on a project with stakeholders?

Somehow, attendees expected the “leader” to take more responsibility from their side; being in the shoes of a “team member” was almost always at a lower delegation level.

Ultimately, they agreed those expectations were not aligned, so we created a few action steps to improve alignment.

What did I learn?

The only problem that can’t be solved is an unspoken one. Discussing our expectations using Delegation Poker from Mng 3.0 saved many hours explaining who should do what.

Of course, in this workshop, I had some pitfalls on which I reflected afterward, and I would like to share with you my learnings:

– I didn’t expect people to discuss delegation poker so much, and I didn’t plan more than 20 minutes for this exercise. It took me almost an hour. So, the next time, I will plan this exercise to take one hour because I recognised a huge value in this discussion.

– I didn’t prepare enough delegation poker card sets, so I needed to improvise with one group. I used seven papers of the same size and wrote all the details from the cards with my hand. Immediately after this workshop, I ordered more sets of cards.

– People were confused initially about how they would play this game, probably because my instructions weren’t clear enough. For the next time, I will draw some guiding map for this exercise before the workshop and put it on the wall while I am explaining so everyone can visually follow.

Last piece of advice: Think of this tool as something you can adapt to your needs. After you learn how to implement this tool a few times, I dare you to use it even for something else. I started to think about how I could connect these tools with the levels of responsibility, but this is another story.