# Delegation & Teamwork Limits

Tune how your leader employees hand off work to teammates. Set how many teammates a leader can delegate to at once, how far a delegation chain can reach, how long a delegated teammate can work before timing out, and how tolerant employees are of repeating themselves before loop protection stops them.

When a leader employee delegates work, several limits shape how that delegation behaves. These controls live in Technical Settings and apply per tenant, giving you direct control over the tradeoff between throughput, cost, and runaway risk.

Parallel Delegations sets how many teammates a leader can hand work to at the same time, from 2 to 15, with a default of 10. Delegation Reach controls how many levels deep a chain of delegation can go, from 1 to 3, with 3 as the default. Teammate Work Time is the number of minutes a delegated teammate can keep working before its leader gives up and moves on, from 5 to 60 minutes, defaulting to 30. Loop Protection sets how tolerant employees are of repeating the same action before the system treats it as a stuck loop and stops.

This is different from Max Agent Steps, a separate Technical Settings control (50 to 1000) that limits how many total reasoning steps a single employee takes in one run. Delegation & Teamwork Limits only govern behavior between a leader and its teammates: how many it can hand work to at once, how far that chain can extend, and how long it waits. It also has nothing to do with team headcount. How many employees you can hire onto a team is a plan limit, not something these controls touch.

## Why these limits exist

Delegation is powerful but uncontrolled delegation can spiral: a leader spinning up too many teammates at once, a chain of delegation going too many levels deep, a teammate running far longer than the task warrants, or an employee stuck repeating the same failed action. Each of these four controls closes one of those failure modes without turning delegation off.

Because the ranges are admin-configurable rather than hardcoded, a workspace running simple single-level delegation can keep defaults conservative, while a workspace running larger leader-led teams can raise the ceiling deliberately.

## What each control does

Parallel Delegations: the number of teammates a leader can hand work to in a single turn, from 2 to 15, default 10. If a leader's response tries to delegate to more teammates than the limit allows, the system keeps the first N calls in order and drops the rest rather than failing the whole turn. If a leader tries to delegate the same task to the same teammate twice in one turn, only the first call runs; the duplicate is dropped automatically.

Delegation Reach: how many levels a delegation chain can extend, from 1 to 3. Level 1 means the leader works solo with no delegation. Level 2 allows delegation within the same team only. Level 3, the default, allows delegation across teams. A teammate at the third level is always treated as a plain team member and can never re-delegate further, so a chain can never exceed three hops no matter how it's configured.

Teammate Work Time: the number of minutes a delegated teammate can keep working before its leader gives up and moves on, from 5 to 60 minutes, default 30. This is a per-teammate ceiling, not a limit on the whole delegated task; a leader that gives up on one slow teammate can still move ahead with the rest of the work.

Loop Protection: how tolerant employees are of repeating themselves before the system calls it a loop and stops. Strict warns after 3 identical repeats and force-stops at 5. Balanced, the system default, warns at 5 and stops at 8. Relaxed warns at 8 and stops at 12. At the warn threshold the employee gets a one-time nudge that it's repeating itself; at the hard limit, the system strips the repeating tool calls from that response so the employee has to produce a final answer instead of continuing the loop.

## How It Works

**Four independent limits, each with a safe default and an admin-adjustable range**

Each control exposes a min/max range with a sensible default. Parallel Delegations and Teammate Work Time are entered as numbers within their allowed range. Delegation Reach and Loop Protection are picked from a small set of named levels, each with a plain-language description of what it means for how your employees behave.

Changes save immediately and apply to future delegation activity. Nothing here needs a redeploy or a support ticket: it's a normal settings page a workspace admin can adjust as their team's needs change.

## Use Cases

### Scaling up a leader-led team

A workspace running a larger team under one leader employee raises Parallel Delegations toward its 15-teammate ceiling so the leader can hand off more simultaneous pieces of a big task instead of processing teammates one at a time.

### Keeping delegation shallow and predictable

A workspace that only wants a single layer of delegation, no sub-delegation, sets Delegation Reach to level 1 or 2 so a teammate can't itself become a leader and spawn further delegates.

### Preventing a stuck teammate from stalling work

A workspace tightens Teammate Work Time below the 30-minute default so a delegated teammate that gets stuck on a task times out quickly and the leader can reassign or report the failure instead of waiting the full window.

### Tuning loop tolerance for a noisy tool

A workspace whose employees occasionally retry a flaky external tool sets Loop Protection to relaxed, warning at 8 repeats and stopping at 12, so a few retries aren't mistaken for a stuck loop while a genuinely broken repeat pattern still gets caught.

## FAQ

### Who can change these settings?

A workspace admin, from the Technical Settings page under the Delegation & Teamwork section. Changes apply immediately to the tenant.

### What happens if a teammate exceeds the work time limit?

The leader that delegated the work gives up waiting on that specific teammate and moves on, rather than the whole task hanging indefinitely on one slow teammate. Other teammates working in parallel are unaffected.

### What does Loop Protection actually stop?

It watches for an employee repeating the exact same tool call with the same arguments without making progress. Strict trips after 3 repeats, balanced (the default) after 5, and relaxed after 8, each with a hard stop a few repeats later that forces a final answer.

### Does raising Delegation Reach let any employee delegate more?

No, it only raises the ceiling on how many levels a delegation chain is allowed to reach: 1 for no delegation, 2 for same-team only, 3 for cross-team. Whether an employee delegates at all still depends on it being set up as a leader with teammates, and a teammate at the deepest level can never re-delegate regardless of this setting.

### What happens if a leader tries to delegate to more teammates than Parallel Delegations allows?

The system keeps the first N delegation calls, in the order the leader made them, and silently drops the rest of that turn rather than failing the whole response. A leader that tries to send the same teammate two copies of the same task in one turn also has the duplicate dropped.

## Where Delegation & Teamwork Limits fits

Delegation & Teamwork Limits is part of What stops them from going wrong.

Your AI agents pause before any sensitive action and wait for your approval. PII is detected and redacted before it reaches the model. Content policies block harmful or off-brand output. Execution limits prevent runaway tasks. A Sistava mentor pairs with every employee to spot blockers and keep work on track alongside their team leader. Set company-wide policies once and every employee follows them, including future hires.

- [What stops them from going wrong](/en/features/guardrails): Nothing sensitive happens without your say.

## Read the guide

- [Guide: Delegation & Teamwork Limits](/en/guide/setup/leaders)

## More in Guardrails

- [AI Guardrails & Policies](/en/features/guardrails/guardrails): A Security Officer that checks every message going into and coming out of every AI employee you have. Five policies, each with its own switch: Input Safety stops prompt injection and jailbreak attempts, Output Safety keeps unfit replies from being sent, PII Protection replaces personal data with markers before the model reads it, Data Leakage Prevention keeps your setup and secrets in-house, and Topic Control holds employees to the subjects you choose. Turn on what you need from Settings, Technical, Security Officer and it covers every employee on the next message, including the ones you hire later. Checks run in parallel on a separate lightweight model, so protection costs a fraction of a message and your team never feels the wait. A running count of what has been caught, the busiest policy, and a live inspector showing every individual message are all on the same page.
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## Explore

- [Every feature](/en/features)
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- [Pricing](/en/pricing)