Strategy, technology & epistemicsPart V

The Monkey

When someone brings you a problem, watch where the monkey ends up. It should stay on their back.

William Oncken Jr. and Donald Wass wrote "Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?" in HBR in 1974. It's been one of HBR's most-reprinted articles ever, which tells you something about how durable the problem is.

The metaphor. A team member walks into your office: "Boss, I've got a problem." The "monkey" is the next move on that problem. While they're talking, the monkey is on their back. Then you say something like "let me think about it" or "I'll get back to you." The monkey just hopped onto your back.

Now scale that up. Twenty team members, each with a problem. Each meeting ends with you saying "leave it with me." By Friday afternoon you have twenty monkeys on your back, you're exhausted, you've done none of your own work, and your team has spent the week sitting around waiting for you to feed their monkeys.

The job of a manager isn't to take other people's monkeys. It's to make sure each monkey ends the meeting back on the right person's back. You can coach, ask questions, set the constraints, define what counts as success. But the next action on the problem should rarely be yours.

Oncken's practical rules are worth knowing:

1. Decide on each monkey: feed it or shoot it. Either the problem is worth working on or it isn't. Don't let it sit half-alive on your desk indefinitely. 2. Keep the monkey population small. A good manager has very few open monkeys of their own. Most monkeys belong to someone else. 3. Feed monkeys by appointment, not on demand. A team member shouldn't be able to put a monkey on your back just by walking by. Office hours, scheduled check-ins. 4. Feed the monkey face to face or by phone, not in writing. Written back-and-forth means the monkey is asleep on your desk between messages. Conversation forces a decision. 5. Every monkey gets a "next feeding time" and a "degree of initiative." The team member knows what they're doing and when they'll report back.

The hard part is emotional. Taking the monkey feels helpful. It looks like leadership. Handing the monkey back feels like passing the buck. But the manager carrying twenty monkeys is the manager whose team isn't learning, isn't growing, and isn't getting things done.

A useful test at the end of any meeting: "Whose name is the next action under?" If it's yours, and it didn't need to be, the monkey just changed shoulders.

Examples in the wild