In a dynamic world, decisions must be taken quickly and, above all, competently and expertly.
For instance, in hierarchical structures, the decision-makers are usually too far from the actual situation and have to make the decisions. Thus they become the organisation’s bottleneck.
How can you make better decisions faster? How to improve work responsiveness and employees motivations? One well-proven succeeding way is by getting decision-making processes transparent and sustainably promote self-organisation.
At this point, “Delegation Poker” offers an opportunity to deal with the various levels of delegation of decisions playfully; and sustainably promote your employees’ self-organisation.
What is “Delegation Poker”?
Jurgen Appelo’s card game essentially serves to discuss and test one of the critical elements of agile leadership: the delegation of decisions, step by step. The aim is to clarify in specific situations who have responsibilities and power to decide.
In this way, “Delegation Poker”: creates transparency regarding the decision-making process; relieves the management level as well as the project teams; and, last but not least, the individual employees.
“Delegation Poker” can stimulate discourse about the different possibilities of decision-making processes; create clarity about the advantages and disadvantages of the respective degrees of delegation, and jointly find the best possible formula for the manager and the team in a specific situation.
How does “Delegation Poker” work?
In “Delegation Poker” there are basically seven levels of delegation:
- The first level corresponds to the “announcement”, in which the manager only informs the team of their decision.
- At the second level, the manager decides but tries to convince the team of the correctness of this decision.
- On the third level, the “consultation”, the manager is advised by the team before making a decision.
- The fourth stage, the ” agreement “, aims at a consensus between the team and the manager.
- From the fifth level (“advise”), the decision-making authority shifts towards the team, which is now being advised by the manager.
- In the sixth stage, the manager only inquiries about the result of the decision (“Inquire”).
- At the seventh and final stage, the “delegation”, the team makes the decision autonomously.
Game delegation poker
Before the game, each player receives a set of cards that are numbered 1-7 according to the levels described. Before starting, the players think about relevant scenarios in which a decision must be taken, for example hiring new employees. Each player now chooses a delegation-level that they consider suitable. After all, players have decided, the cards are revealed. The players with the highest and lowest values explain their decision. The aim of the game is to reach a common consensus. The game continues until a unanimous result is achieved. Then the next scene can be played.
How can you promote transparency and self-organization with “Delegation Poker”?
With “Delegation Poker”, executives can set specific impulses, implement new decision-making principles, and transfer more powers to their employees.
The design of decision-making processes represents the core aspect of different leadership styles, the effectiveness of which depends on the respective context. Depending on each specific context and general conditions of the various scenarios, we agree and align with the appropriate leadership style.
Primarily, “Delegation Poker” creates transparency about the decision-making processes and ensures more security by setting up guidelines for action that take the pressure off the management level and the individual employee.
Clear guidelines for making decisions allow self-organized work and can give each employee the freedom they need. It is important to think of the derived guidelines as dynamic; Which are open to further adjustments.
MY EMPIRIC LEARNING
As an Enterprise Agile Coach, to improve the Time to Market and enable companies to deliver value faster, I learned that is crucial to question teams about what impediments they have to improve their velocity and performance. In most cases, decision-making is key to increase value delivery velocity.
Delegation poker is one of the exercises that help teams get more autonomy, faster decisions making, resulting in more responsiveness and value delivery speed.
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To know more about this practice, you could find more details here: management30: delegation-poker
If you need any further help on making your organization well energized and more responsive to the markets, you can also contact us
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