One of my favorite ways of thinking about evaluating people that worked for me was how they tamed “monkeys”.
“Management Time: Who’s Got The Monkey” by William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass is one of the most popular articles ever published by the Harvard Business Review. It is a must read for anyone in a management role and one of the most valuable articles I ever read. “Monkeys” are problems and employees frequently want to offload their “monkeys” to their boss. Anyone in a supervisory position has experienced their employees communicating that there is an issue and that they would like help solving it. The unwary boss often offers to help by sending an email, making a call or having a conversation with the involved parties. Later, the employee may actually stop by to check on the boss’s progress. This effectively causes a role reversal. Now the employee is “supervising” the manager! They have effectively transferred the “monkey” to their supervisor. You can imagine multiple employees attempting to off load their “monkeys” throughout the day. Very quickly, the manager is overwhelmed with unanticipated tasks they need to perform and that pile up on top of the responsibilities they already have. This is often the source of the common complaint that the boss is a bottleneck!
How you as a manager deal with “monkeys” is crucial and the main focus of the article. After reading the article originally, I actually began to visualize monkey’s coming across my desk and developed a simple phrase that became my “monkey” taming mantra; “what are you going to do about it?”
How your staff deals with “monkeys” provides a wonderful perspective for setting goals and assessing performance. When someone is presented with a problem there are a variety of approaches that Oncken and Wass suggest they can take to address the situation:
* They can bring the problem to their manager for them to deal with.
* They can bring the problem to their manager’s attention and ask what to do. These first two demonstrate the lowest level of initiative, consideration and creativity.
* They can present the problem and make a recommendation. “Boss, we have a problem and this is my suggesting for dealing with it”. Hopefully, the recommendation involves them handling the issue rather than attempting to unload the “monkey”.
* They can act and immediately inform the manager there was a issue and explain how they handled it, hopefully to everyone’s satisfaction.
* They can act and inform the manager when they normally provide updates.
These potential actions provide a great framework for evaluating employees. Clearly, you want employees that take initiative and can creatively deal with problems. Under no circumstances should they be transferring “monkeys” to you. But you also want employees that can balance the seriousness of a situation with their capabilities to deal with potentially complex issues or personalities and know when to inform you of their plan of action before moving ahead.
As a starting point assess where your employees are today on the continuum of transferring “monkeys” to you or confidently dealing with problems and informing you of a successfully handled issue. Think of recent situations where “monkeys” were dealt with poorly or addressed extremely well. Review these real life situations with the employees and in team meetings. Create specific goals for the year around how staff members manage “monkeys” by reviewing the ways they can more effectively address issues and your expectations for them. Bring poorly handled “monkeys” to their attention immediately and explore how they might have managed the situation better.
Using this framework will not only free up your managerial time, but will act as a powerful development tool for your staff.
After all, you don't want monkeys running wild do you?
Oncken Jr., William and Wass, Donald L., 1999, “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey”, Harvard Business Review, Nov.-Dec., Viewed Feb 6, 2019,
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