Delegation Skills
Training Exercises and Resources

This is a quick exercise on delegating, designed to demonstrate a key point to participants. It is very easy to run, and its success mainly depends on your execution. Consider rehearsing this so that it can be delivered smoothly.

It is ideal for courses where you are teaching how to lead people or a team. The aim of the exercise is to highlight the importance of providing specific details rather than having unrealistic expectations. People perform much better when they know what is expected of them. This exercise, or demo, helps to instil the importance of this concept which you can deliver with your performance. Make it dramatic and memorable to help delegates remember it in the future.

It is ideal for courses on teambuilding, leadership, delegation skills, team work and similar.

There is simply so much to do these days both professionally and personally. In order to move on to bigger and grander projects, there is eventually a need to delegate tasks. Delegation skill is fundamental in the professional growth of an individual. As you gain more experience and climb up the job ladder, it becomes increasingly important for you to delegate the details and grunt work to others and spend your time on management and high-level decision making.

Unfortunately, most people find delegation cumbersome or tedious. This is particularly the case with people who are not natural at asking others to do things for them or that they feel they want to remain in control.

There are, however, numerous benefits to delegations and also for people who are delegated too. These people get to contribute, prove themselves, work on something different and if the right tasks are delegated, grow and succeed in their professional lives.

Since there are so many parameters involved in making decisions on delegation, it is useful to approach this systematically. This exercise provides a structure that an individual can follow to see what tasks can be delegated, why they should be delegated and how.

This exercise is based on filling a detailed form and thinking about a variety of tasks both on a personal and professional level. As such it is best if the exercise is carried out individually rather than in a group. Have a group discussion afterwards once everyone has filled in their forms so that participants can learn from each other and get inspired.

Delegation is a great way to save time. Apart from saving time, delegation helps motivate your staff by giving them responsibility. Your team will benefit by participating in activities and the decision making process and therefore becomes more capable and autonomous over time. The organisation will benefit from having a pool of staff that can cover each other, take more responsibility and resolve issues on their own.

As a result, a manager must constantly think about delegating tasks to others not just to save time but also to help the team grow and become more capable.

Depending on how much control you want to have over a delegated task, you can choose from one of the six levels of delegation to control the outcome and also how much time you want to save.

In this exercise, participants will learn about these six levels and will participate in an activity to better understand them.

This is a powerful team building activity that brings out the potential qualities of a good leader. It is a fairly physical exercise and you may need to brief the participants beforehand so they can come ready to participate in this exercise (for example, come with comfortable cloth). It is an ideal exercise for team building where you can explore a range of topics on management and how to respond to a manager’s instructions.