There's a sentence I hear often in my work with managers and team leaders, especially those who have recently been promoted: "I never have time, and meanwhile my team is waiting for me." The days are full of meetings, the evenings go on catching up and at the weekend the laptop comes out "just for an hour", yet the feeling is of always being behind, while the people in the team seem to be standing still, waiting for an answer, an approval, a decision.
The scene usually starts innocently. You're on your way to a meeting, you bump into someone from your team in the corridor and they say "by the way, we've got a problem". They explain the situation in two minutes, you know enough to see it matters but not enough to decide on the spot, so you give the most natural answer in the world: "I'm in a rush right now, let me think about it and I'll get back to you." They walk away lighter, and you walk into your meeting with one more thing to do. You didn't even notice.
The monkey that jumps from one back to another
In 1974 William Oncken and Donald Wass described this dynamic in a Harvard Business Review article that went on to become one of the most widely read in the magazine's history, and they did it with an image that's hard to forget: the monkey on your back. The monkey is the next move on a problem. Before that conversation in the corridor it was on your colleague's back, because it was their turn to act; after your "let me think about it" it jumped onto yours, and from that moment it's them waiting for you.
What I find most powerful about the article is the reversal it describes. By taking the monkey, the manager effectively puts themselves in their team member's position, because they've taken on a responsibility and promised an update, which are exactly the things we usually ask of the people who work for us. And sure enough, a few days later the team member puts their head round the door and asks "so, how's it going?", which means they're the one checking up on you.
Monkeys don't only jump in corridors. They jump when you close a meeting with "send me an email with the details", because as soon as the email arrives the next move is yours again; they jump when you say "let me know if you need a hand" on a project that can't move forward without your approval; they jump when you offer to "put together a first draft" of someone else's objectives. What these have in common is that the problem is treated as belonging to both of you, and a monkey straddling two backs almost always ends up on the boss's.
Oncken and Wass also do a bit of maths that makes you smile and think at the same time: if four team members, with all the goodwill in the world, hand you just three monkeys a day each, by the end of the week you have sixty, far too many to really deal with. So you become the bottleneck, the one who "never decides", while they wait, and the time you'd need for the things that really matter (what your own boss asks of you, what only you can do) disappears behind other people's monkeys.
Why we take them
Nobody takes other people's monkeys out of malice or laziness, quite the opposite. We often do it because we want to help, because it seems quicker to do it ourselves than to explain, or because we could solve that problem with our eyes closed. It happens above all to people who became managers after being excellent at the technical work: solving problems was for years the thing that made us feel useful and recognised, and suddenly stopping feels almost like a loss.
Then there's a deeper reason, which Stephen Covey brings out in the commentary HBR published alongside the article when it was reissued in 1999. Many managers, even those who seem most self-assured, find it hard to let go of control, and Covey links this to a sense of scarcity: the often unspoken idea that if someone in the team takes the initiative and shines, there's a little less left for us, and our authority comes out weaker. It's an understandable fear, but it comes at a high price, because it keeps the people in the team smaller than they could be and keeps us buried in things that shouldn't be ours.
That's why, rather than asking "how do I delegate better?", in coaching I find it useful to start from a different question: "what do I get out of taking this monkey?" The answers are almost always interesting: feeling indispensable, avoiding a conflict, not having to watch someone make a mistake. Understanding what we gain from it is the first step towards being able to stop.
How to hand it back
The solution Oncken and Wass propose is simple to describe and a little harder to practise: every time someone brings you a problem, you put it on the table between you and work out together what the next move could be for them, not for you. Sometimes you find it straight away, sometimes not, and then it's perfectly fine to let the monkey sleep on their back overnight and meet again the next day at a set time. In the meantime they're the one working and you're the one waiting, which is exactly the right order of things. The underlying principle is that you can help as much as you like, but the problem stays theirs: it comes into the room on their back and leaves the same way.
In practice this mostly changes the questions you ask. Instead of "leave it with me" you can ask "what do you suggest?", "what options do you see?", "what's the next step, and when shall we talk about it again?". At first people may be a bit put out, because they were used to leaving your office lighter, but within a few weeks they start turning up with a proposal already in their pocket.
It also helps a lot to agree on how much initiative is expected for each topic. The authors describe five levels, ranging from waiting to be told what to do, to asking what to do, to recommending a solution and then carrying it out, to acting and reporting straight away, up to acting independently and reporting back routinely. The first two, in their view, a team member should never use: anyone who brings you a problem should come with at least a proposal. And for every monkey that leaves your office, it should be clear what level of autonomy it travels with and when you'll meet again to talk about it.
Finally, there are a few practical rules for "feeding" monkeys, which I'll summarise in my own way. Every monkey should either be moved forward or let go with an explicit decision, because the ones forgotten in a corner end up costing far more time. Keep their number within what you can actually follow. Monkeys are looked at by appointment, not whenever it happens, and better face to face than by email, because with email the next move almost always comes back to you. And each one needs a clear next date and level of initiative, which you can change together but never leave vague.
Handing back doesn't mean sending away
There's a risk in all this, and Covey himself points it out: reading the article as an invitation to say "not my problem, sort it out yourself". Handing the monkey back only works if the person has both the will and the ability to deal with it, and that isn't always the case. At first it means investing time in helping people grow, and that time is often more than it would have taken you to solve the problem yourself, but it's an investment that pays back, whereas solving everything personally is a cost that repeats every single day.
And then there's trust. If making mistakes in front of the boss is scary in your team, people will keep bringing you their monkeys, however well you hand them back, because keeping them is a risk they don't want to take. Delegating for real means building an ongoing dialogue, in which mistakes can be talked about and "how's it going?" is genuine interest rather than control. That's where a manager's job stops being about doing things and becomes about helping the people who do them grow.
And with your own boss?
The same logic applies looking upwards, and it connects to what I wrote about communicating with the people above us. When you go to your boss with "we've got a problem" and nothing else, you're the one trying to pass them a monkey. If instead you arrive with a proposal, at least at the third of the five levels of initiative, the monkey stays on your back, you decide the timing and the content, and your boss only has to say yes, no or "let's try it this way". It's the same behaviour you'd like from your team, and perhaps the most effective way to teach it is to start practising it yourself.
If you want to try it from tomorrow, here's a small exercise: at the end of the day, count how many monkeys you've picked up and from whom, and ask yourself for each one what the other person's next move could have been. You'll probably find more than you expected, and just seeing them is a good start.
