Today’s class marks the end of the weeks training in Leadership and management skills and it was finished off with the topic of delegation. Today’s date was a special one, 11/11/11 which is St. Martins day in Germany. Therefore at 11:11am on 11/11/11 the participants would celebrate this day with paper hats later followed with streamers and donuts.

To start of the day the facilitators had the participants lined up in relation to shoe sizes and then paired them off with opposite persons and this then formed the pairs for the first task. This task involved  one person of each pair getting a sheet of paper with a design (of squares joined together) and the other being required to draw the design whilst sitting back to back with their partner and taking directions on how to do this. They then came together in the plenary to discuss the results. They found that this task involved preciseness of information given and active listening, as well as trust in the other person. From the descriptions of the participants and answers to various questions the trainers created a mind map of the issues discussed. This led to the question, “What is delegation?” as the task has shown that there is a difference between delegation and instructions.

Michael then gave his input into delegation and discussed that even though you could call the above task ‘delegation’, there is much more to delegation that this and therefore different scales would be dealt with. This included instructions right through to complete delegation. The participants were then asked about their thoughts on the principles of delegation as well as the do’s and don’ts.  They were then encouraged to work in pairs once more to think about delegation questions concerning them personally (i.e. where something’s was delegated to them and when they had delegated something). These issues were then discussed in the plenary.

As today would be shortened for the participants they were encouraged to work during lunch on their next task which was to perform a role play on a manager delegating tasks, competencies and responsibilities. For this they were divided into a male group, female group (to see if there can be different perspectives) and one group to observe the two groups.  As it turned out, the female group were able to manage this task well and perform their role play where the manager (Shalini) delegated various tasks of a fictional project to her Employee (Naks) and tried to do so with a certain level of delegation. However The male group found this task hard and were unable to organize themselves during the planning of the task.

Shalini and Naks during the role play task

To finish the weeks work off the group were required to give back feedback on the training. This included recommendations and what they will take with them (content wise and personally). This was presented on pin boards before Michael said goodbye for now (he will be back after the internships) and Ilka said farewell to the group.