Delegate decisions in teams

• Pay attention to the decision-making vacuum: Manager believes the team makes decision - team believes the manager decides
• Manager makes decisions that the team can and wants to make
• Delegation poker as a game can help here
  • Makes these decision spaces visible
  • Takes care of the “permission” area
• Our goal
  • to release decision space with “permission” and hand it over to the people with knowledge/skills/will (in agencies mostly the teams with customer contact)
  • As little decision-making vacuum as possible
  • Delegation poker as a tool

Delegation Poker

• Tool by Jürgen Appelo/Management 3.0
• based on Planning Poker in Scrum Planning
• Participants: (lateral) leaders, team, moderator
• Duration: 1 × 2 hours (possibly as a replacement for a retrospective)

Scale of decision making

The higher the number, the more a decision is placed in the hands of the team by the manager.

Leadership

1. Tell: Make decisions as a manager
2. Sell: Convince the team of the decision
3. Consult: Consult with the team before making the decision
4. Agree: Decide together with the team
5. Advise: Contribute to the team’s decision
6. Inquire: be informed of the decision
7. Delegate: No influence, the team decides

Disclaimer: Cards are written from the manager’s point of view

Process

1. create a table on the whiteboard (criteria (X-axis), participants (Y-axis))
2. collection of criteria incl. cluster (individual work (5 minutes))
   • Variant 1: with many criteria, dot voting for voting
   • Variant 2: one participant per round may choose a topic in turn
3. play poker for each round of criteria
   • Record the number of managers
   • (exclude highest and lowest number and) record team average
   • Variant 1: manager = team
   • Variant 2: Manager > Team
   • Variant 3: manager < team
4. open discussion in case of difference
   • Develop an understanding of the situation (examples, previous dealings, expectations)
   • What does the team need to take on more responsibility?
   • What does the manager need in order to hand over more responsibility?
   • What to-dos can be derived from this?
   • Who takes care of them?
   • Important: Time Boxing! 5 Optional: another round of poker
5. make the results visible and document them
   • The delegation board created during the meeting can now be hung up in the team room where it is clearly visible to the team.
   • It is also worth documenting the findings in the wiki. This allows everyone involved to track developments over a longer period of time.
6. make a follow-up appointment
   • to discuss the next topics/recognize changes

What are the possible cases?

Manager > employee/team:

The line manager wants to hand over more responsibility and decisions to the team. What does the team need to be able to take on this responsibility?

• Access to KPIs
• An appointment for consultation with the manager

Manager < employee/team

The team would like to take more decisions themselves and thus bear more responsibility. What does the manager need to be able to hand over responsibility?

• A regular appointment to involve the team
• Enable access to wiki areas

What now?

It is unlikely that you will clarify all the issues and have the same expectations at the first meeting. That’s why it’s a good idea to repeat the delegation poker.

Try it out at the next retrospective or in the Team Space!