Delegation Poker is the first game I created for the Management 3.0 course. The exercise allows players to discuss how to delegate decisions to a team.
I now have a new version available of the playing cards. You can download them here.
You can find a description of Delegation Poker in an earlier blog post published earlier this year.
Enjoy!
In the situation of a manager and several team members we can identify four types of trust relationships. I describe each of these in four different blog posts. The first post was Trust Your People, the second was Earn Trust from Your People, and the third was Help People to Trust Each Other.
Every time I’m on a plane I get to see the safety instructions, reminding me that I have to put on the oxygen mask on myself first, before helping any obnoxiously screaming little bastards next to me. You can only save others if you save yourself first. Another version of this principle says that you can only love others when you love yourself first.
This gave me the idea to suggest the following alternative:
You can only trust others if you trust yourself first.
In Making Things Happen Scott Berkun describes why self-reliance is so important. You must believe in yourself, and stay true to your own reason and common sense, even when others disagree with you. You should only change your mind when new insights have convinced you, not when other people have pressured you to reconsider. Because doing something that you don’t believe in is an act against the trust in yourself. A self-reliant person has confidence in herself, while still allowing new information to change her mind.
And that is why you have to trust yourself.
You must trust your people (1), earn trust from your people (2), and help people to trust each other (3). And you can do all that only if you trust yourself (4).
This concludes my series on trust. I trust you found some value in it.
(image by MMMpictures)
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In management and leadership literature one of the topics most often referred to is trust. Trust between two people operates in two directions. I can choose to trust you, and you can choose to trust me, but neither requires the other. In the situation of a manager and several team members we can identify four types of trust relationships. I describe each of these in four different blog posts. The first post was Trust Your People, the second was Earn Trust from Your People.
Even when you trust people, and they trust you, the situation still needs some work when the team members are reluctant to trust each other. This is particularly true for newly formed teams, teams spread over multiple locations, and team members with different job titles, like programmers vs. testers.
When trust among team members is low (for whatever reason), you should concern yourself with communication and commitment.
First, you make sure that communication among team members is improved by increasing the bandwidth and quality of their communication. Stand-up meetings, co-location, pair programming, team dinners, brainstorm sessions, and information radiators, are just a few of the many things that you and the team can introduce to get to know (and trust) each other.
Second, you see to it that commitment for activities in the team is being negotiated and respected. People new to agile software development may need a little help in this area. Assist individual team members in doing what they promised to do, so that their fellow team members are able to trust them. When it turns out they are unable to keep their commitment, help them in communicating this early and honestly.
Your involvement may not be necessary with an experienced team that has been doing projects together for a long time. But when there’s a small change in team membership, you might want to watch carefully that the new team members are participating fully in communication and commitment, and earning trust in their new team.
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In management and leadership literature one of the topics most often referred to is trust. Trust between two people operates in two directions. I can choose to trust you, and you can choose to trust me, but neither requires the other. In the situation of a manager and several team members we can identify four types of trust relationships. I describe each of these in four different blog posts. The first post was Trust Your People.
Trust must be earned. And you can earn it by always delivering on your promises.
When I tell someone that I will get back to her about some problem, I will get back to her to talk about the problem. When I promise to email a document, I will send that document. And when I tell someone that he has full responsibility for a job, I will refrain from interfering and mind my own business, until my input is explicitly requested.
We recently invited one of my spouse’s colleagues to stay for the weekend in our house in Brussels. At the morning of her arrival we were waiting for her call to tell us what time to pick her up from the railway station. But no call arrived. When we finally called her ourselves she said she wasn’t coming, for some vague and unconvincing reason. Any trust that I had in this person evaporated on the spot. Why someone would commit to a visit, and then not even bother calling it off, is beyond my understanding.
You build trust simply by doing what you have committed to. Trust means that people know they can rely on you. It is easy to build, but even easier to break. People destroy it when their behavior is unpredictably unpleasant. But trust also suffers when people are either predictably unpleasant (someone always doing precisely the things you don’t want him to do) or unpredictably pleasant (someone doing the things you want only when you least expect it).
Make sure that your behavior as a manager is predictably pleasant, and I’m sure you will have no trouble earning trust from your people.
(image by Steve Punter)
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In management and leadership literature one of the topics most often referred to is trust. Trust between two people operates in two directions. I can choose to trust you, and you can choose to trust me, but neither requires the other. In the situation of a manager and several team members we can identify four types of trust relationships. I describe each of these in four different blog posts.
When you empower people, you should (occasionally) be able to sit back and enjoy the peace of your workspace, and the contents of your cookie jar. Other people are doing the work. Not you. That’s great. But try and keep it that way.
When an empowered team walks into your office and asks you to decide on an issue, find a way to have them solve the problem themselves. I once heard of a manager who tossed a coin for every decision his team asked him to make. This quickly motivated the team to make their own decisions, as they balked at being ruled by a penny. I sometimes use a mirror as a metaphor. As a manager you can act as a mirror to the team. You can help them with their own thinking processes. If they look at you for guidance, you hold up the mirror and help them to find guidance in themselves.
When a team member walks into your office and asks you to do something for which you had delegated responsibility to someone else, make it clear to her that this is now the job of that other person. Tell her that trust is meant to be a transitive relation. If employee A trusts manager M to make a decision, and manager M trusts empowered employee B to make such decisions, then by agreement employee A should also trust employee B. Never betray your trust in employee B by making decisions for him, and certainly not behind his back!
And finally, when nobody walks into your office, then don’t criticize them for not consulting you about their decisions, even if they turn out to be terrible. If you want to be consulted in advance you must clearly communicate those expectations. Of course, if you have communicated such a requirement, and the team hasn’t lived up to it, then they have broken the trust, and will need to repair it. A contribution to the cookie jar will do nicely, I think.
(image by jonrawlinson)
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In the science fiction movie The Fifth Element, the character Zorg is a devious and ruthless industrialist ruler, who is time and time again confronted with the incompetence of his assistants. Near the end of the movie, frustrated after yet another of their failures, Zorg picks up the guns himself and utters the words “If you want something done, do it yourself.” It was one of my favorite lines in the movie, being so recognizable. I have probably said the same words dozens of times throughout my career.
Professor and researcher Kenneth W. Thomas would have recognized that Zorg had fallen into the Micromanagement Trap:
You would like to delegate more authority to workers, and decide that you will do this as soon as the workers show they can handle it. In the meantime, you feel the need to closely monitor and control events, making most of the operational decisions. What you are less aware of is that this micromanagement –even if you intend it to be temporary– often prevents the workers from being able to self-manage or otherwise show that they could handle more authority. So workers continue to act in a dependent way and you are trapped into an exhausting attempt to make all the decisions, while wondering why workers aren’t as responsible as you are. [Kenneth W. Thomas – Intrinsic Motivation at Work - p.66]
The workers-are-not-ready-for-this idea is one of the biggest obstacles to empowerment in organizations. The problem is, managers are usually right! Workers are often not fully ready for things that should be delegated. If they were they would probably already be doing those things! But the if-you-want-something-done-do-it-yourself solution is not the best way to get yourself out of such a situation.
You must treat delegation of authority as an investment. It takes a while to get a return on your investment, and until that time delegation will just cost you time, energy, money, and possibly some frustration. Taking work back to do it yourself, before workers are able to do that work without your supervision, is like taking your money out of the bank before being paid interest. The useless effort of giving something away and then taking it back will only leave you with a net loss. In other words, the solution is if-you-want-something-done-practice-your-patience.
After you delegate something to an employee, when things go wrong your only proper response would be: “What did I do wrong?” Maybe your explanation of the goal wasn’t clear enough. Maybe you didn’t properly define the constraints. Perhaps there was nobody coaching the worker. Maybe you should have selected a different level of authority. Or you should have delegated the work to a team instead of just one person. When something bad happens after you delegate a task to a worker, do not take (back) responsibility for the task. Instead, take responsibility for the way you’ve delegated it.
Your business may require you to be as devious and ruthless as Zorg. But do not pick up the guns yourself.
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In their book Behind Closed Doors Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby published a handy checklist that you can use for delegation of tasks. I have taken the liberty to augment their list with a few questions of my own.
Feel free to use this list whenever you delegate work to someone else.
(Oh, and do read Johanna's and Esther's book!)
Every time you delegate work to other people, you should be able to answer “Yes” (or "N/A") to every question. If you have to answer “No” to any of the questions, and you still need to delegate the work, then openly discuss your dilemma, and agree on a compromise. Maybe the right tools have not arrived yet, or the deadline is unknown, or you still have to solve the coaching issue. As long as you talk openly about it, both you and the people you’re delegating the work to can agree on intentions, and commit to solutions and results. Even when circumstances are sometimes less than ideal.
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Empowerment is often incorrectly perceived as a binary choice. Either you empower someone, or you don’t. In reality, your options are more varied than that. We can distinguish between different levels of authority.
“Empowerment is a continuous variable; people can be viewed as more or less empowered, rather than empowered or not empowered.” - G.M. Spreitzer
In your very first driving lesson your driving instructor may have given you the steering wheel, but I’m sure he told you exactly when to go left and when to go right. But after a number of lessons, when you had gained some experience, he might have said “Let’s drive to the shopping center, where you almost rammed a phone booth last week,” and it would have been your job to find a way to get there. And with a really experienced driver, the instructor might have said “Why don't you drive around a bit? Mind if I take a nap?”
For each individual activity we can distinguish seven levels of authority (modified from Susan M. Heathfield):
You can vary these levels of authority, depending on the topic. For example:
Every topic requires its own level of authority, and the further you go the better it is. But in some cases, it is best to start by telling or selling, and then gradually increase the authority of team members as their experience grows.
"The best way to empower team members is gradually and systematically. [...] Responsibilities for self-management and decision making should be turned over to employees on an as-ready basis."
It will probably take our team some time before they're able to completely refactor my business models into something I cannot recognize, as they did with my code. But if they do, and the results are again better then mine, you won't hear me complaining. I would be the manager of an extremely powerful team.- S. Caudron
(image by kevindooley)
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Some managers don’t like the idea of empowering people. They fear a loss of authority, power, and control. They also fear competition when subordinates become more knowledgeable than their own managers. And finally, after empowering their subordinates, managers fear there is nothing left for them to do, which makes them feel redundant. (This is particularly a problem in an economical downturn, when organizations need to cut jobs, and top management is looking for dispensable people.) When managers feel insecure about their jobs they hang on harder to their power and position, reluctant to share it with (what they perceive as) competitors.
Here's an important message for these managers:
Giving power to your people does not diminish your own power. Quite the reverse. It is more likely to increase it.The power and status you have in an organization is a function of the power and status of the people you are leading. Consider this: What sounds more interesting and powerful to you? Leading a team of industry veterans, who are building a high-quality system that knocks people off their feet? Or leading a group of interns, fresh from school and wet behind the ears, building a system so bad it knocks your brain out? I’m quite sure that being the manager of the celebrity team means you have a much higher status in the eyes of many. The better your team, the bigger your power. And to make your team better, you empower them.
The only way to make yourself indispensable is to make yourself dispensable. - John C. Maxwell
A complex system is often not a zero sum game. Making poor countries wealthier does not diminish the wealth in rich countries. The European settlers in the Wild West of America did not steal jobs from Native Americans. (Though they stole plenty of other things, I’m afraid.) And my “social capital” on Twitter and LinkedIn does not decrease when I compliment or recommend any of my friends or contacts. On the contrary, my on-line social standing depends on my support for others.
If you find yourself in a position where you fear for the loss of power, control, and maybe even your job, consider this: I invest in other people’s social capital because it increases my own. And I believe in migration of work to poor countries because it creates other and better jobs at home. And I believe you must empower people because it will increase your own status in the organization. Don't forget, we call them complex systems because situations are never as simple as people think, and often quite paradoxical.
Oh, and from personal experience I can tell you that top management usually doesn’t fire managers of empowered teams. They are more likely to fire the ones responsible for unmanageable systems. And, of course, the ones that had their brains knocked out.
(image by Rodrigo Adonis)
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