Need time to lead? Don’t give a monkey’s
Happy Birthday to me!
To celebrate, I am sharing an idea based on an HBR piece published the year I was born called Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?
Some of you will know the concept: ‘the monkey’ represents a work problem that leads to a to-do list item.
Imagine a Zoom meeting where someone in your team reports that the billings for your biggest international client have been messed up. Someone wrongly thought it included VAT. Unfortunately, your client isn’t very keen to accept an extra 20% for a closed project.
If you say that you will follow up with the client—you have just agreed to take and nurse someone else’s sick monkey. Now it’s on you to sort it out.
If you:
get the 20% paid, you’ve revived the monkey and might be a hero, but it will take your time away from what you were supposed to do.
put it off, while doing what you should be doing, the monkey will get sicker, feeding on your conscience at 2am.
fail, you have (figuratively) got a dead monkey on your hands.
All of these options show a manager being managed upwards by their own team… by accumulating troops of sick monkeys, they are overworked, while their direct reports head off to play golf.
Instead, try the Mikey approach
A friend of mine still talks about an old boss called Mikey, who walked the floors, asking “How’s it going?”. If you presented him with a problem, he’d ask how you were planning to resolve it, and nod supportively at your proposed solution.
Even though Mikey never bothered to revive a single monkey himself (and quite possibly had no idea how to), he was effective. He trusted people, which built their skills. Plus, it gave him time to do his bit of the job very well: they never had to deal with a pain-in-the-arse client. (Perhaps related, he was a great laugh and bought generous rounds on a Friday night.)
So I ask you:
Are you a Mikey?
Do you work for a Mikey? (go on, give them a bit of credit)
Or are you trapped under a mountain of sick monkeys?
Here’s to all the good stuff that came out of 1974
Next week: my first ever ‘collaboration’ (don’t laugh) with a man who thinks I should call myself ‘a creator’.
(Thunder claps from stage left)
Christine AKA The Creator
