Good morning. Almost nothing you carried into the weekend started out as yours. It arrived one 'leave it with me' at a time.
Leadership.
Who's Got the Monkey
Somebody caught you between the lift and your desk this morning, described a problem, and heard you say you would take a look at it. Four seconds, and the next move was yours. Count what you were carrying by the time you sat down — then count how much of it anyone actually asked you to take.
In Harvard Business Review in 1974, the management consultants William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass published a scene every manager recognises, in what became one of the magazine's best-selling reprints. Someone who reports to you stops you in the corridor: we have a problem. You listen, you cannot settle it on the spot, and you say the fatal sentence — leave it with me and I will get back to you. The problem walked up the corridor with them, and it walks away with you. Oncken called the next move on any task a monkey, and the article's insight is that a monkey transfers the moment you accept the next move, not the moment you accept responsibility. Their model divides a manager's time into three: boss-imposed, system-imposed and self-imposed. The last one splits again, into discretionary time and the subordinate-imposed time that eats it. The trap is the inversion nobody notices while it is happening: the manager doing the team's work, while the team stands outside the door supervising the manager for progress.
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