Delegation Theater: you’re empowered as long as you make the decision I’d make, or you do the task the way I’d do it. But with the Team Empowerment Map, we have a clear, practical path to productive empowerment.
In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, Peter and Richard introduce the Team Empowerment Map, a practical technique for clarifying decision-making across teams. Built on Jurgen Appelo’s 7 Levels of Delegation, this tool reveals where decisions are centralized, shared, or fully delegated—and how to shift toward real empowerment.
You’ll learn:
- How to spot “Delegation Theater” in your organization
- How to use the Empowerment Map to visualize who decides what
- How one team used the tool to improve ownership and clarity
- What it takes to move decisions toward team autonomy the right way
Whether you’re a leader or team member, this episode will help you build alignment, avoid confusion, and empower your team effectively.
Downloads
Complete the short form below to download:
Download the Team Empowerment Map & Facilitation Guide
Resources mentioned in the show
Six Conditions of a Team, and the Three Jobs of Management, to help increase empowerment.
Jurgen Appelo’s original description of the 7 Levels of Delegation model
Transcript
Richard: Delegation Theater: “you’re empowered as long as you make the decision I’d make, or you do the task the way I’d do it.” A leader rarely puts it that way. They don’t intend to do Delegation Theater. What usually happens is a leader delegates work fully intending to trust their teams, and as long as they get the result they expected, everything’s great.
But if they get a result they’re not happy with, they jump back in, overriding the decision or doing the work themselves. To the leader, this is just ensuring a good outcome, but to the person or team the work was delegated to, it feels like Delegation Theater. It’s yours as long as you do exactly what I would’ve done.
Peter: Why is this a problem? I mean, isn’t the boss in this situation just ensuring good results? Well, not necessarily. It might feel safe for maybe short-term results, but it ignores the possibility that the team’s ideas could be even better. Worse, though, is that over the long term Delegation Theater undermines trust, demotivates teams, and prevents growth.
Richard: Yeah, most leaders we encounter who do this aren’t doing it out of some kind of conscious power grab. They want the benefits of what we call productive empowerment, where everyone benefits: the leader gets time back for important work, teams get a chance to step up and grow, and the business and customers benefit from faster decisions and scaled leadership growth.
Peter: So in today’s episode, we’ll share our Team Empowerment Map, a simple tool that helps leaders and teams get aligned on levels of empowerment across a range of decisions. Using the map makes it clear who decides what today and how we want to grow that over time.
Richard: Before we go there, a reminder that this show is a free resource sponsored by Humanizing Work where we help organizations get better at leadership, product management and collaboration. Visit our website, humanizingwork.com and schedule a conversation with us to start improving today. And if you want to support the show, the best thing you can do if you’re watching on YouTube is subscribe, like the episode, click the bell icon to get notified of new episodes, and drop us a comment with your thoughts on today’s topic.
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Peter: So how do we shift from Delegation Theater to real productive empowerment? The Team Empowerment Map is a simple visual tool that makes that clear.
We list seven levels of empowerment borrowed from Jurgen Appelo’s seven levels of delegation model. At the top of the list are three levels where it’s the leader’s decision. The leader just decides, the leader decides and brings others along, and the leader seeks advice before making a decision. At the bottom are three levels where it’s the team’s or employee’s decision, a mirror image of the three levels for the leader. And in the middle, level four, are decisions requiring consensus.
Richard: We’ve described this model in other episodes, so check out Episode 67, A Path to Real Empowerment, for more details about the different levels.
Peter: So, those seven levels provide the latitude grid lines for the map, and then the fun starts. We create a list of decisions where there may be debate or disagreement.
You can use our starter set of 12 decisions to get you going and then add your own. Our starter set includes things like what tools does the team use to do its work, and how is success defined for the team? Then the team maps those decisions across the seven levels, creating a visual of who owns what decisions at what level.
So how do we get the team and leadership to agree on what goes where without endless debate? Well, there are several facilitation techniques you can use to reach a shared map. Jurgen describes delegation poker, where people hold up numbered cards for a given decision and then debate the differences.
We’ve also seen good results from a silent sorting exercise, or using a one-two-team format where individuals complete their version of the map, then align with a partner, and then pairs align across the team.
Richard: Getting alignment on this seems like it ought to be straightforward, but there are some common roadblocks that teams run into.
Here are three tips to make your mapping session truly effective. To make them easier to remember, we call the first tip “when in doubt, split it out,” the second “no wishful thinking,” and the last “four is a chore.” Let’s go through them one at a time.
Tip one: When in doubt, split it out. For many decisions you’ll be tempted to answer: “it depends.” For example, for that decision on what tools the team uses, some tools may be mandated at a higher level in the organization, like email and calendar tools, while others are variable, like task management apps. Where there’s doubt, split the card into more specific decisions until there’s no gray area left.
Tip two: No wishful thinking. The goal here is to get an honest visualization of the current state. This isn’t about where we wish it was or how it should be. Avoid the Delegation Theater trap by clearly mapping how things actually work today. And by the way, when we do that with our clients, we often find things that a leader says are at a five, are actually at a three.
Tip three: Four is a chore. Teams often pile decisions into level four consensus. This signals avoidance of accountability. Consensus decisions are slow and should be rare. Team agreements or definitions of done might belong at level four, but technical decisions typically shouldn’t. Delegate these clearly to individuals at levels five or six.
Peter: Alright, if you followed those tips and gotten a complete map, now we can move on to improvement. The team chooses one item that could potentially move to a higher empowerment level by improving, maybe using the six conditions of a team that we describe in Episode 63, or strengthening the three jobs of management we describe in Episode 56.
So to do this, we indicate what level the decision will move from and to. Then describe what changes will enable that shift in empowerment.
For example, a team we recently worked with had “what metrics the team tracks and how they’re used” sitting at a level three—consult—after the initial mapping. Now, metrics were a hot topic for that department ever since a new VP had introduced a data-driven decision-making initiative.
The team wanted to shift that to a five. So they asked what would need to change for Remi, the manager, to feel comfortable delegating metrics to the team. Remi mentioned that he attends a weekly meeting where he has to share team metrics and justify them to several stakeholders, and he reported that he didn’t particularly like those meetings and would love it if someone from the team could step in.
But they’d need a better sense of who was in the meeting, how to communicate with each participant effectively, and what to do if the metrics changed. So Remi decided to start bringing one of the team leads to the meeting as an observer, with the goal of empowering them to own the team metrics going forward.
Which was a mix of creating clarity for who was in the meeting and what they were looking for, increasing capability by helping this team lead step into that role, and improving the system—changing how things worked in that organization. After only a month, that team lead was able to take over attendance at those meetings and the team shifted that decision from a three to a five on their map.
This step ensures that the map isn’t just a visual—it’s a tool for meaningful, ongoing improvement.
Richard: Delegation Theater isn’t inevitable. With the Team Empowerment Map, we have a clear, practical path to productive empowerment. Leaders are human, so there still may be times they break a promise, but we can use those wobbles to review the map and see what caused them to pull back authority.
We can clarify what needs to change to prevent that in the future, and we can be more honest and open about how we work and how we aspire to work.
Peter: You can try it out today. Download the facilitation guide on the episode page and drop the included image on a whiteboard. Use those 12 common decisions as a starter set. Get decision-making alignment on your team, and start working on pushing empowerment down more proactively.
Richard: Empowerment isn’t just a nice idea. It’s how strong agile organizations win. We hope you’ll use these ideas to improve empowerment in your organization.
Peter: Thanks for tuning in to the Humanizing Work Show. Please subscribe, leave a comment about your experience using the Team Empowerment Map, and share this episode with leaders who might want better delegation, more engaged teams, and stronger results.
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