Managing The Monkeys!

How often do we, as managers, as friends, as colleagues, feel over-burdened with work and responsibilities, unable to scale up, unable to manage all the expectations? Sometimes, it's plain simple over work, but sometimes, it's just about not being able to manage the monkeys!

There was this beautiful article in the HBR Nov-Dec 1974, by William Oncken, Jr. and Donald Wass, that has probably had the biggest positive influence in my life!

This blog tries to capture the learnings from that article, and I hope it will benefit you just the way it did me!

Management Time

As a manager, we can classify our time as one of the following three:
1) Boss-imposed time - to do what our bosses require us to, and which we cannot refuse to do without penalty!
2) System-imposed time - the time we need to do what the system requires us to do, especially requests from peers. We can choose to ignore some of these demands, but this carries a penalty too!
3) Self-imposed time - the time needed to do what the manager originates or wants to do himself. A part of this time is "subordinate time" - time spent with juniors and team members, and the rest is "discretionary time" - the time he can use to do whatever he chooses!

A manager cannot easily get rid of the boss and system imposed time, and hence the successful manager will try and reduce the subordinate time, increase the discretionary time, and use this time to get better control of the boss and system imposed time.

Where is the monkey?

Every time your subordinate comes to you with a problem, ask yourself if it fits these two characteristics:
1) you know enough about it to get involved and
2) you do not know enough to make a spot decision

If this is true, you have probably just taken on a new monkey. Why? Because the end result of the conversation with your subordinate will probably be a situation where the next action item needs to come from you, not your subordinate. You will need to read his report, you will need to do some thinking, find some solutions, and then get back to the subordinate. You will need to take care of his monkey, and while you are burdened with the task, your subordinate is free waiting for you to get back to him!

Not only have you become your subordinate's subordinate, you have probably even promised him a progress report. And worse, your subordinate will probably remind you a couple of times that it is still pending, only adding to your headaches!

Taking control

So how does one take control? Some simple rules... whenever your subordinate comes to you with a monkey, keep it on the desk between you two, and then figure out how the next step will be the subordinate's, not yours! If you cannot figure out the next step, just let the monkey go back overnight with the subordinate and continue the discussion the next day. But DO NOT offer to take care of the monkey on your shoulder while you sleep that night!

There are five kinds of initiatives a manager can exercise, each giving him different levels of control over time and content

1) wait until told (lowest initiative)
2) ask what to do
3) recommend, then take action
4) act, but advice at once
5) act on own, then report (highest initiative)

While a manager himself should never indulge in 1 or 2 with respect to his boss and the system (doing that makes him lose control over his time!), he needs to also outlaw the use of these initiatives by his subordinates, and heavily encourage the use of the other more active initiatives.

Taking care of the monkey - the 5 rules

There are 5 simple rules that help in keeping the initiative with the subordinate, and the care the feeding of the monkeys:

1) Monkeys should be fed or shot - else they starve to death and manager wastes a lot of time on postmortems and attempted resurrections
2) The mponkey population should be kept below the max number the manager has time to feed. It should not take more than 15 min to feed a properly prepared money!
3) Monkeys should be fed by appointment only. Managers should not try and hunt down starving monkeys and try feeding them!
4) Monkeys should be fed face to face or by telephone - using mail transfers the initiative back to the manager!
5) Each monkey should have a clear assigned next feeding time and degree of initiative, and this should not be left vague!