How to foster empowerment through effective delegation
Imagine the following situation: You won a prize consisting of one week to spend on an all-inclusive resort on a paradise island, but with no Internet connection available there and your flight departures in less than 24 hours. Would you accept the prize and travel with no concerns on job matters or delays on your responsibilities?
In Daniela’s case (manager), the answer was unfortunately negative. No doubt, some rest was what she needed most, even by medical prescription, but, according to her, there were no proper circumstances for any kind of work leave. However, this condition was not just Daniela’s but it spread to the majority of the team and, what is more worrying, a different scenario was not seen in the short term.
As of this, we proposed a full-day activity involving all team members, to get a diagnosis of the situation for further evaluation of an action plan.
It was Saturday and, after an extended breakfast, the team discussion began to find possible causes for the current situation. The conclusion arrived soon: Most of the tasks were carried out by few hands and that, created work overloads, delays due to bottlenecks, and even friction among some workmates.
Once the diagnosis was validated by everyone, we decided to experiment with new ways of working, focusing on team empowerment, getting better effectiveness levels through the delegation, and the decision-making process. This is done through a tool called Delegation Poker and its combination with other Management 3.0 practices.
The false dilemma of delegation
As the famous theory X and Y by Douglas Mc Gregor represents two opposite attitudes related to leadership, there are two different logics used to delegate, represented in the following statements:
“If you want to be well served, make yourself the bed”. Catalan proverb.
“If you want to make small things well, make them yourself. If you want to make big things with great impact, learn to delegate.” John C. Maxwell
In this regard, Management 3.0 stresses important aspects:
• Decision is not a binary process. There are different shades between dictatorship and anarchy.
• There is no unique recipe: the level of the delegation will depend on the context of each team and organization. What works for some, does not ensure success for others.
• This is a gradual process: delegation must be progressive and controlled to avoid chaos.
Delegation generates profits, but when there is an investment
If we consider the huge amount of time spent in doing or controlling tasks, which, due to their impact or complexity, could be delegated or automated, benefits from the delegation, are obvious on a short-term basis.
However, provided that we all know this, why is so hard to delegate? There are many reasons, but this article includes those brought up by Daniela and that are related to what is mentioned above: Delegation Process Gradualness.
For Daniela, it was not possible under this context to spend time in training others. Therefore, she decided to delegate, but always in the same way, and to the most well-prepared people.
To delegate is to enable, to make someone able to do something. Therefore, and as in any other learning process, we must assume that effective delegation requires an investment of resources, mainly TIME.
At first, the sellers ‘complaints indicated too short time to meet the client´s requirements. Since this variance cannot be changed immediately, the analysis focused on what was at hand that we could change, such as the task distribution.
So, before addressing the delegation issue, we took some time to define which the tasks of the team were, and how they were distributed among the members to have more clarity about their responsibilities. For this, we used another Management 3.0 practice: Team Competency Matrix (link).
Empowering the team with Delegation Poker
Adapted from the situational leadership model by Hersey and Blanchard, Delegation Poker is a powerful tool in Management 3.0, which consists of a 7-card game that we can use to easy the delegation and decision-making processes that promote more agile building organizations.
This practice offers 7 levels of possible delegations, each of one represented by one card, where it is established who and how delegation will take place for each of the topics, tasks, or processes in consideration.
Delegation Levels
Level 1: Saying: The boss is the one who makes decisions, based on the criteria he/she believes best accurate, and then, he/she communicates them to the team.
Level 2: Selling: The boss makes decisions but then explains the reasoning behind them.
Level 3: Consulting: The boss makes decisions, but before that, he/she listens to the different opinions in the team.
Level 4: Agreeing: The decision is made as a whole, with the team members and with the decision-making mechanism agreed by all of them.
Level 5: Advising: Technically, we can say that delegation starts showing up at this level. We express our points of view and probable criteria to consider, but the employee or the team makes the decision
Level 6: Asking: The employee or the Team decides and the boss only makes questions about reasons and criteria considered.
Level 7: Delegating: This is the highest level of Delegation. The employee or the team makes decisions by themselves with no intervention of the boss.
How do we implement Delegation Poker?
We start the game by giving each participant a deck of cards and explaining the meaning of each of them.
Once the objectives and the scope of the exercise are clear, all the tasks from the area were identified and exposed (including the ones sent to Backlot), so Daniela as, the manager, decides which of them will be used under a delegation policy.
For those tasks under delegation, we use the Delegation Poker cards, and each participant exposed their criteria and the reasons considered.
In the case of dissent, the main participants involved voted and the agreement was validated by the majority. In this case, Daniela´s vote weighed two votes. It was a previous team´s agreement.
Finally, we used the Delegation Board to make the information visible and available for all the team members.
As a result of this activity, the team better balanced the number of tasks among the members and found areas where a certain maturity was lacking for decision-making and that was where Daniela began to accompany these members to reach the agreed delegation level.
What did we learn?
The ability to delegate is a key element to make progress in the organization’s agility. Decentralizing the decision-making allows a faster adaptation to changes in the business, and at the same time, promotes a healthier working environment.
As a facilitator, I learned that there are situations like this one, with such a complexity, that demands the involvement of different approaches and the use of more than one tool. I also learned about the importance of listening to “the pain” of our client to adapt my toolset into his specific issues, looking for delivering value and offering customized solutions, before deploying unique recipes or canned dynamics.
Based on this learning, my next experiment with Delegation Poker will combine with Team Decision Matrix for those decisions delegated to the team.
Do you think you are delegating efficiently? If this practice looked interesting to you, visit the official Management 3.0 web page. You can also find there a free-download Spanish version of the Delegation Poker, printable and ready to use.