On Saturday morning, looking out of his office window, the manager finally saw who was working for whom. On Monday he comes in just late enough that his four subordinates are already waiting outside his door. He calls them in one at a time.
In the story William Oncken Jr. and Donald Wass told in the Harvard Business Review in 1974, each problem, which they call a monkey, goes on the desk between the manager and its owner. Together they work out how the next move could be the subordinate’s.
No monkey leaves the room until two things are settled. One is the time of the next meeting, which goes in the manager’s calendar. The other is a degree of initiative. The authors list five: wait until told; ask what to do; recommend, then take resulting action; act, but advise at once; act on own, then routinely report. The bottom two are outlawed.
The detail that is easy to miss is where the degree sits. It is agreed “for each problem,” not for each person. Nothing stops Jones from walking out with one monkey she settles alone and another that needs her recommendation first. The article’s fifth rule allows the degree to change by mutual consent, but never to become “vague or indefinite.”
Delegation isn’t on or off. Agree up front how far it goes, one decision at a time.
A dial with seven stops
Oncken and Wass first wrote the scale for managers facing their own bosses. A manager who waits to be told, they warned, “forfeits any right to complain about what he or she is told to do or when.”
In Management 3.0 (2010), Jurgen Appelo turned the dial to the boss’s side and gave it seven stops, which his book calls authority levels. Management 3.0’s website words them from the manager’s point of view: tell (“I will tell them”), sell (“I will try and sell it to them”), consult (“I will consult and then decide”), agree (“We will agree together”), advise (“I will advise but they decide”), inquire (“I will inquire after they decide”) and delegate (“I will fully delegate”). “Delegation is not a binary thing,” the site says. “There are plenty of ‘shades of gray’ between being a dictator and being an anarchist.”
Two tools come with it. A delegation board lists key decision areas down the side and the seven levels across the top, with one note per row. In delegation poker, someone reads out a situation, everyone picks a card in private, and all reveal at once. The people holding the highest and lowest cards explain themselves. Whoever sits alone at the top, say the one player who always plays 7, scores nothing, a rule meant to delegate as far as possible without going too far.
Oncken’s scale measures how much initiative the subordinate takes. Appelo’s measures how much the manager keeps. Both ask for the level to be set before the work starts, area by area.
Haidilao’s 2018 listing prospectus reads like a board drawn for a hot pot chain. Servers may use “reasonable discretion to give discounts, free dishes or even complimentary meals,” restaurant managers handle hiring, firing and promotion, and expansion strategy “will be developed and implemented only through our headquarters,” which also keeps food safety and the supply chain.
The word “yours”
Say you’ve just made Lena a team lead and you hand her the hiring for two open roles. “It’s yours,” you tell her. You mean she runs the process and you make the offer, which is consult, level 3. She may hear level 7. Then she could tell a candidate the job is his, at a salary you would never have approved. Then you either walk it back and maybe lose the candidate, or let it stand and teach her that “yours” means “until I disagree.”
The board version takes ten minutes. Writing the job ad: 7. Choosing whom to interview: 5, you advise and she decides. The offer and the salary: 3. A row can move right once she has handled it well. What matters is that you are both reading the same row.
Everything at the handoff
Anthropic’s Research feature faces the same question between machines. A lead agent plans the job, decides how many helper agents to start and what each one covers, sends them to search the web in parallel, and decides afterward whether more research is needed. In the design Anthropic described in June 2025, the lead waits for its helpers to finish and “can’t steer subagents” while they work. Each helper chooses its own searches, and the lead learns what it did afterward, which is close to Appelo’s level 6.
So everything had to be settled at the handoff. Early on, the lead handed out short instructions such as “research the semiconductor shortage.” One helper studied the 2021 automotive chip crisis, while two others duplicated work on 2025 supply chains. The engineers’ fix was to require four things in every brief: an objective, an output format, guidance on tools and sources, and clear task boundaries.
The less the lead could steer during the run, the more the brief had to carry.
Claude Code puts a board in a settings file. Its permission rules mark each tool or command as allow, ask or deny. The documentation’s example lets the agent run npm scripts and git commits without asking, and refuses commands that begin with git push. Unlike a poker hand, these rules are “enforced by Claude Code, not by the model.” Writing the same wish in a CLAUDE.md file, the docs say, shapes what Claude tries but doesn’t change what it is allowed to do.
Oncken’s manager kept each monkey’s next feeding time in his calendar. An agent’s rows sit in a JSON file, and the docs add a warning his calendar never needed: a push written another way, such as git -C . push, doesn’t match the rule.