Using the 7 Levels of Delegation with unknown people in a real practice

Hey everyone, how are you?

I believe that many of you already know the 7 levels of delegation so rest assured that I will no longer be a person who will write and explain what it is, where it comes from and how to use it because there are a lot of good articles published (you can read on our blog in Portuguese).

My goal is to tell a real case that happened to me in a Management 3.0 class that I taught in 2019 in Porto, Portugal.

Context: There were 17 students in the class learning about Management 3.0, most of whom did not know each other. So far nothing special.

On the first day we arrived at the delegation and empowerment content, we went through theory and also a practice using a fictional case and after the dynamic debriefing, I surprised the class with a real practice where they should use the 7 levels of delegation to solve a question:

They should choose 3 people among themselves to win a voucher to take the Professional Agile Leadership Certification test from Scrum.Org.

Note: At that time Management 3.0 was running an experiment and made some vouchers available for trainers to donate to class students. I had 3 vouchers available and I could use them with students in any way I wanted and I thought it was fair to let them organize themselves and decide for themselves.

But Ricardo, this has everything to go wrong. They don’t know each other, there are 17 people, it’s a recognized certification, it’s going to be a fight…. But it did not ;-)

Here’s how I aligned the dynamics and their constraints (connecting with the content of Align Constraints):

• There were 3 vouchers available so they should choose 3 people;
• The certification test had a deadline of 2 months, so whoever won should do the test on time;
• After taking the test, students should inform me if they passed or not (because I needed to pass this information on to the Management 3.0 experiment).
• Delegation level for the dynamic: 6 (I had already explained all levels of delegation to students in advance and they practiced on the fictional case).
• Talk, decide and let me know who will be the 3 people who will win the vouchers

From there they got together in a group and started talking and voting to find out:

• Who wants the voucher?
• What reason do you want the voucher?
• Who has time to study and take the exam?
• Who do you think can get through?
• Etc…

The conversations were happening little by little, some people naturally gave up participation because they understood that it didn’t make as much sense for them at that moment as it would for other students who were also interested.

Yes folks, that’s what you understood: They had met about 3 to 4 hours before, they were talking about getting a voucher for an important certification and some people gave up participating in favor of others.

They took about 30 minutes to decide who would be the 3 people who would win the voucher and be amazed: there was no fight, on the contrary, the staff had a lot of fun and helped even more in the team building of the class.

I want to mention some important points that helped in their interaction.

• I usually start the class by practicing (and presenting) the Personal Map with the students. This helped a lot so that they knew each other better at the beginning of the class. Anyone who wants to know more about this practice can read an article by one of my mentors, Tadeu Marinho;
• The class model is pulled and not pushed. That is, the content is passed through practices and then connected with the theory and this also helped because the students interacted a lot in other dynamics that had already happened;
• The students were sensational and worked with the purpose of electing the 3 people who would not only be more apt for the test but that the certification would benefit their career

In the end, it was a very fun and practical moment that proved that people are able to organize themselves, align restrictions and be empowered to make decisions. Of course, each case is different and the levels of delegation vary for each context (don’t forget that).

After that the class followed its course and we had 2 very practical and fun days of exchange of knowledge and experience and a few months later the students informed me of the results of the tests. One of them passed and two others didn’t, but it was almost and I passed the information to Management 3.0 to validate or invalidate his experiment.

Some reflections:

“You cannot delegate what has no autonomy”. Unknown Author (I’m trying to figure out)

“Delegation is the first step towards Trust”, Toledo, Rodrigo de — Knowledge 21

I’m happy to be able to share this case with you and if you want to talk more about it, I’m available.

I wanna to say thanks to the students for participating in the class and in the experiment.

See you soon ;-)
Ricardo Caldas