Delegation Poker Scenarios

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First, a Delegation Poker participant reads an example scenario and each participant chooses a card (face down!). Then the highest and lowest delegation levels chosen are explained and discussed. It’s a good idea to start with a series of innocuous stories before getting to potential conflicts. 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.

These FREE games can be used for icebreakers, leadership games or training seminars. We hope they will be of use to you and anyone looking for a fun/learning experience in any leadership environment.

If you have any great success stories or funny stories please use our contact us form for feedback or if you have any suggestions of other great games we’d love to hear from you! Our community here at Leadership Lime is all about sharing and mutual resourcing for all the tools we need as leaders to succeed. We look forward to hearing about how you have succeeded with leadership games!

The benefits for icebreakers:

1. Break tension of groups of new people.
2. Allow people to express their personalities.
3. Help to reveal natural leaders within groups.
4. To create a fun environment which is essential to learn.
5. Bring confidence to a group.

Icebreakers are necessary in all group situations. Why? Because people don’t feel comfortable in new groups and wont express themselves honestly until they do. This is a tremendous opportunity to break the ice but also do it with a dynamic game to identify leadership personalities and learn important characteristics of the group.

Delegation Poker Scenarios Games

The benefits for team development

1. Bring cohesion to a team of individuals.
2. Allow people to fill roles and see team-dynamics.
3. Build stronger friendships among teams.
4. Help to understand individual needs.
5. Give leadership roles to potential new leaders.

Teams can come together in a cohesive dynamic in simple games. You can easily manipulate games to achieve the desired effects you desire and you’d be surprised how simply great results can occur. You can encourage more timid team members to achieve more confidence in leadership roles and teach more outgoing people to listen and play a more complex role. Basically these games can create a fun and memorable learning environment for teams.

The benefits for training

1. The development of team-understanding.
2. Opportunity of observation and commenting on behaviour.
3. Understanding how to cope with changing team dynamics.
4. Group based learning is essential for adult education.
5. Important theory can be taught through experiential learning.

Training is imperative for leadership development. Training allows for growth and success in leadership tasks. We’ve included this area ultimately as practical learning environments are a huge part of adult education and therefore in most teams (with the exception of children) the biggest amount of information can be learnt through the experience of these leadership games.

Leadership Games and Icebreakers

This is a team building game which requires people to be relatively fit and able to do a type of cross-country race. It takes a good amount of time, therefore it’s good for a weekend away or training conference. Of course, as with all of our games it can be adapted to many situations.

These are a selection of short leadership games and icebreakers when you don’t have a lot of time to work with. It’s still important to build a good atmosphere and sense of connection between your group or team, so click on the link above and have a look.

Charades is a great icebreaker or for training purposes. It helps to get people out of their comfort zones and realize how they’re communicating with each other. This one is particular good for older people as it’s been a well known game for years.

Leadings the Blind is a fun game, which is great for people to use their own communication skills to get through to the end. This is also well known but its good to get a group of people out of a conference or class room and refresh them half way through the day.

Leaders you Admire is taking the examples of other leaders and drawing great characteristics from them. Group discussion is also a high value in this icebreaker/leadership game.

This can be used to gather leadership traits and brainstorm/categorize their values.

YouTube Leadership Traits is a great and fun game. It’s very creative and innovative as it challenges modern information gathering methods and lets people express the creative leader inside of them.

The Leadership Race is a game designed to learn and gage the leadership experience of the chosen group. Be a strong and communicative leader to use this game to draw the best out of your group and also share some important insights.

The human icebreaker is the perfect leadership game to play at the beginning of a training day or talk. It opens up conversation and forces the group to communicate with each other to get the answers they need to play the game.

This business training game is really innovative and creative. It brings together similar aspects of teamwork and communication training but also allows for creativity and depth whilst working out and pioneering a business idea. Although this is a training game – real ideas and vision can be established through it.

This game is just meant for fun and laughter to set a good environment for learning or wake people up if it’s a tough day. It can also be used for an icebreaker as it causes a lot of laughter and interaction between people.

This leadership game is an adaption of a classic party game which most of us grew up on. It’s brilliant for building fun and good relationships between team members and helps for people who are a little reserved and shy to really engage and build better friendships.

Quite often, I encounter situations where no clear responsibilities are defined between two entities, such as a manager and a team or between two teams. They kind of figure itout when a situation occurs. They prefer to avoid general commitments. This can lead to confusion and misunderstandings, which in turn lead to dissatisfaction and finally to an ineffective and inefficient organisation.

A recent situation was the recruitment of a new software developer, who was accepted by the team but rejected by their superior. This led to dissatisfaction because the team felt it should decide who to hire and who not. Other situations include the tools a team is allowed to use, which trainings they are allowed to attend or who prioritises the backlog in a hierarchy of product owners (I will postpone a general discussion about a hierarchy of product owners).

On the other hand, managers often do not want to hand over responsibility. Often because they see delegation as a binary decision – either I decide, or You decide. They might fear that delegating decisions will make them powerless. This does not have to be the case. You can define intermediate stages of delegation. Based on the different leadership styles from Situational Leadership Theory (Directing, Coaching, Supporting, Delegating), Jurgen Appelo came up with different levels of delegation as shown in Figure 1.

These shades of delegation help managers to gradually transfer responsibility to a team. This way the manager can learn to trust a team, and the team learns to deal with the additional responsibility. The manager assigns more power to the team without totally renouncing his involvement. It is a major step towards self-organising teams.

It’s a bit like when parents give their children more responsibility, e.g. first they bring their child to school, later they allow their child to walk to school with friends, and later they let their child decide how to get to school by themselves. In this journey, the parents learn to trust their child and hence can focus on other tasks. The child itself gains more self-esteem, freedom and independence. It is beneficial for both sides.

Delegation Poker (by Jurgen Appelo) helps people and teams to agree on a level of delegation for key decision areas (Figure 1). Most importantly, while defining these levels of delegation, the participants have a discussion. This, in turn, fosters mutual understanding and empathy.

The levels of delegation of a specific topic range from command on the left end of the spectrum (“I tell them what to do”) to full delegation (“I leave it up to them”) (Figure 1).

Preparation

Each participant receives a deck of cards. You can download templates for the cards or buy them at the Management 3.0 shop. For workshops or trainings, I usually print them out, laminate and cut them.
In addition, print out some larger cards for a board that secures the final decision. Alternatively, I prepared an Excel sheet with the cards pasted into and projected it on a wall (see attachment).
Collect topics (key decision areas) where (the levels of) responsibility is not clear in advance and invite the participants to bring these issues to the workshop.

Delegation Poker Scenarios Game

Participants

Ask people or representatives on both sides of one relationship, i.e. a superior and her team or two teams that work with each other. At least have two and at most eight participants to avoid too lengthy discussions. If the teams are larger, invite the teams to send representatives.
In the latter case, the representatives should agree on the subjects before the workshops and have discussed the levels of delegation within their teams.

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Execution

Explain the background as described above (Why are we doing this? What is the expected outcome?)
Firstly, agree on the decision areas and, if necessary, refine them to a finer-grained level. They must be clear and precise and should leave little room for interpretation; otherwise, you will have this discussion later in the process.
Explain that the results of the workshop are an experiment, i.e. “We will test these levels of delegation for the next two months and adjust them if appropriate.”
Each participant receives a deck of cards.
The delegation poker then goes as follows (the process is similar to Planning Poker, which is often used for the estimation of backlog items)
- The facilitator names the topic.
- Each participant now chooses a card of the level of delegation they think is appropriate without showing the card to the other participants.
- If everyone is ready, the facilitator asks to reveal their decision.
- If the cards are distinct, the people with the highest and lowest value share their decision with the others. There will be a time-boxed discussion. Subsequently, a new voting will take place, in which the results should be more equal. The participants then should decide on one level of delegation. The discussion that leads to a mutual understanding is the most important part here.
- Repeat the steps above until all topics have been discussed.

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Follow-Up

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Make the results publicly available. I usually print them out on at least A3 paper or draw them on a flip chart, which is then placed in the team space or on the floor.
Discuss how the levels of delegation worked out in one of the retrospectives one or two months after this workshop. Write a date on the printout that indicates when the delegation matrix is being reviewed. This further emphasises the matrix as an experiment.

Learnings

The workshop mostly benefits from the discussions the participants have and the subsequent experiment (How do the decisions work in practice?)
As a result, is seen as an experiment, people are more likely to accept it and can even live with slight disagreements. However, don’t forget to reflect on the outcome after a few weeks or months as otherwise, the participants will lose trust in this method.
“With great power comes great responsibility” (Uncle Ben, Spiderman). In the situation I outlined above, we had a discussion about the responsibility that comes with employing a new team member. If the team wants to have the sole right to make the decision about whom to hire, it also has to deal with firing the employee if he doesn’t fit into the team (amongst other obligations). This made the team feel a bit uncomfortable and hence they agreed on delegation level 4 – Agree.

I have played Delegation Poker with teams and managers, Scrum Master and their teams, and managers at different organisational levels with great success. It supports mutual understanding and questions long-established decisions. I also experienced that managers are often okay with being advised or only informed.