Stop Carrying the Monkey: How to Reclaim Your Time as a Boss

Ryan Haylett

You hired people so you'd get your time back. So why are you working 60 or 70 hours a week, which is more than when it was just you?

Dave Rowley

Because somebody walked up and said, "We've got a problem, what should we do?" and you said, "Leave it with me." Or, "Send me an email about it." Those sentences feel helpful. They're actually expensive.

Ryan Haylett

Say it's a supplier that's out of stock. Or a customer who wants a custom spec. Or an invoice that doesn't add up. The employee brings it to you, you say "let me look into it," and right there, the problem changes hands. It leaps off their back and onto yours. This comes from a classic Harvard Business Review piece by William Oncken Junior and Donald Wass, called "Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?" Every unresolved problem is a monkey, and the question is whose back it's sitting on.

Dave Rowley

And the strange part is what happens next. The employee's work on that item stops. They're waiting on you. Then they stop by and say, "Hey, did you get around to looking at that?" So now they're supervising you. Meanwhile your desk collects dozens of these, and none of them are moving.

Ryan Haylett

Let's talk about what that costs. Every decision sitting on your desk is idle time. Picture a crew waiting on an answer about a material substitution. Or a customer waiting on a quote. Or an invoice that doesn't go out because one line item needs your eyes. Nobody's working on those things. They're just sitting in line, and the line runs through you.

Dave Rowley

There's a second cost, and it's the one that really hurts. Oncken breaks a manager's time into buckets. Time the boss imposes, time the system imposes, and self imposed time. Then self imposed time splits again, into subordinate imposed time and discretionary time. Subordinate imposed time is all the monkeys your team handed you. Discretionary time is the hours you control.

Ryan Haylett

And if the monkeys keep multiplying, discretionary time shrinks toward zero. That's the time you'd use to write procedures, fix the schedule, plan for growth. The big stuff. You can't build systems when your whole day is feeding monkeys.

Dave Rowley

One more thing. It trains your team. Asking the owner is safe. If the answer's wrong, it's your fault. Making the call themselves feels risky. So they stop thinking, because you've made not thinking the safest option.

Ryan Haylett

So here's the fix. Oncken describes five degrees of initiative. One, wait until told. Two, ask what to do. Three, recommend an action, then do it once approved. Four, act, and tell the boss right away. Five, act, and report routinely, like in a weekly summary.

Dave Rowley

Levels one and two are the monkey handoff. Level two especially. "What should I do?" forces you to understand the whole problem and invent the answer. So the rule for your standard workflows is simple. Outlaw levels one and two. Nobody brings you a raw problem without a proposed solution.

Ryan Haylett

That lines up with an old idea called Completed Staff Work. Employees hand their boss a solution fully formed and ready for approval, not just a description of the trouble. For a small business, boil it down to three parts. Problem, options, recommendation.

Dave Rowley

Here's how it sounds. Problem: the part is delayed ten days. Options: A, pay forty five dollars for expedited courier from a backup supplier. B, swap in an equivalent approved model from local stock. C, reschedule the client to next Tuesday. Recommendation: A, because forty five dollars protects an eight thousand dollar project milestone today.

Ryan Haylett

And your answer takes ten seconds. "Do A." You didn't investigate anything. You made a decision.

Dave Rowley

But people pass monkeys because they're afraid of making an expensive mistake. So give them guardrails. Set a dollar threshold, maybe two hundred fifty or five hundred dollars per incident, where they can fix a customer complaint, expedite a part, or correct a job site issue without asking you.

Ryan Haylett

Do the math. Say you've got a three person crew standing around for two hours, or a client waiting, because someone's holding out for approval on a seventy five dollar expense. The lost labor and the damaged goodwill cost way more than the seventy five dollars.

Dave Rowley

Then there's the golden rule from that article. While I'm helping you with this problem, it will never become my problem. When this conversation ends, the monkey leaves on your back. Say it out loud. Mean it.

Ryan Haylett

And stop the hallway ambushes. No "got a minute?" and no open ended text dumps. Monkeys get fed by appointment. Ten to fifteen minute sync blocks. And every issue gets one of two outcomes. An agreed action with a named owner, or it's discarded. Nothing floats around in limbo.

Dave Rowley

Okay, quick wins for this week. One. Announce the rule: bring a problem, bring at least two options and a recommendation. Write it down so it isn't a mood.

Ryan Haylett

Two. Give frontline employees written authority to resolve customer or operational issues up to two hundred fifty dollars on their own judgment. Put the number in writing, so nobody has to guess.

Dave Rowley

Three. Replace constant interruptions with two fifteen minute triage windows a day, maybe mid morning and mid afternoon. Blockers get handled in batches, and the rest of the day, you actually get to work.

Ryan Haylett

If you remember one thing, make it this. Your job isn't to carry everyone's problems. It's to build a business where the problems get solved before they reach you. If you want help improving the systems that power your business, learn more at modularity dot us.