Delegation Levels

A visual tool created to empower self-organizing team, to make decision ownership explicit and clarify expectations between manager and team members, as early as possible.
The levels vary from level 1 - Tell, where the manager is explicitly telling his team to execute something, to 7 - Delegate, where the team can decide without even informing the manager of the decision.
The 7 levels are
- tell (e.g., working hours, firing a person)
- sell (e.g., milestone)
- consult (e.g., milestone, unity engine vs unreal engine, team format, hiring a person)
- agree (e.g., team event date)
- advice (e.g. architecture decision)
- inquire (e.g. component architecture)
- delegate (e.g., coding format)
A manager must be careful with how many decisions need to be run through him as he quickly can become a bottleneck for his team
A clear owner is required also for decisions that were delegated to the team (e.g., a specific individuals will make sure that coding format rules are established)
Sometimes there are decisions that are "a tell" from outside of the team, where the entire business unit need to accept the decision
Questions to be answered
- How often do you review levels?
- What are the two parties?
  - Manager and the team, what means the team agreeing, veto/majority/consens
  - Manager and an individual

References