Tag: time management

Monkey Business

Probably less than five times in my life I’ve read something that stunned me, which made me realise I’d uncovered an insight into a problem I’d wrestled with for years. One of those five times was with the delightfully titled book The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey.[1]

I believe there are now 18 books in the One Minute Manager series. I read the original, The One Minute Manager, soon after it first appeared in 1982. I was thrilled by its simplicity, insight, and practicality. So were many others. It has sold over 15 million copies, been translated into 47 languages, and described by Time magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Business Management Books.

The One Minute Manager books typically involve dialogue between a storyteller and a perhaps fictitious leader that everyone called the ‘One Minute Manager’ because he got great results from his people with apparently little time and effort on his part. The books are littered with smart sayings or questions, such as this one early on in The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey: ‘Why is that some managers are typically running out of time while their staffs are typically running out of work?’ When I read that, it landed with a thud in my thinking. Yes, why is that true? It made me read on.

The book begins with a description of the storyteller’s frustration that even when he worked extra hours every weekday and all weekend, he could never get on top of all his work. It seemed he was doing more but accomplishing less. Getting desperate, he attended a time management seminar, which made him more efficient, but that increased efficiency merely made room for more work. His staff always seemed to need something from him before they could move on further with their work.

When the storyteller met with the One Minute Manager and poured out his troubles, he was soon made aware that he was the problem. Or, more specifically, his problem was MONKEYS! These are not monkeys who live in a jungle or zoo. Rather, the One Minute Manager’s definition of a ‘monkey’ was ‘The Next Move’. To explain what that means, the One Minute Manager gave the example of walking down a hall, and being stopped by one of his staff who wanted his input on a problem. He likes solving problems, but that discussion lasted for half an hour. Now the One Minute Manager is late for a meeting, so promises to think about his colleague’s problem and get back to him later. So, what happened there? Until the hall meeting, the monkey (next move) was on his staff member’s back. During the discussion the monkey was on both backs. By the time they parted, the monkey had moved from the subordinate’s back to the manager’s back. No longer was the next move the subordinate’s problem, it was his boss’s problem.

The One Minute Manager points out that two things can be assumed: 1) the matter being considered was part of the staff member’s job; 2) the staff member could and should have offered solutions to the problem. Thus, what the manager allowed during the hall conversation was for him to do two things his subordinate was expected to do: 1) accept responsibility for the problem; 2) promise to bring forward a progress report, in his case to his subordinate. In other words, they had switched roles: the manager took on the worker’s role, and the worker took on the supervisor’s role. Unsurprisingly, the worker now follows up on his boss to see if he’s made progress, and thus pressurises him to do more on what was actually his job.

The example of role-reversal triggered several examples from the storyteller of how he had acquired ‘monkeys’ from his staff – tasks he’d taken off their shoulders and put on his own. Some were straightforward, such as Maria who enlisted her boss’s help because he had a better understanding of certain problems. Maybe he did, but he was now doing her work. He also described ricochet monkeys, for example criticisms from staff about Maria’s work and style because these things caused problems for them. They complained to the storyteller who promised to follow up and report back to them.

Then there was Ben, who was very creative, always generating new ideas, but poor at turning them into finished products. So Ben would submit proposal after proposal, many of which had potential, which he, the boss, would then try to do the work of turning them into viable projects.

These – and many more – should have been handled by the staff themselves. But in each case the storyteller manager had allowed the monkey to climb onto his back. The biggest part of his work overload were those monkeys. Because he was doing large parts of his staff’s work as well as his own, he’d begun to steal time from his personal life: exercise, hobbies, family, church, etc.

Eventually he had run out of time completely, yet monkeys kept coming his way. All he could do was delay, promising he’d eventually get to every task. He was procrastinating; his staff were waiting. Which meant no-one was progressing the monkeys.

What surprised the storyteller was what the One Minute Manager said next – that he had once had the same problem of overwork, except much worse. But then – out of desperation – he attended a time-management seminar. And there, thankfully, he learned about monkey management.

The seminar leader was Bill Oncken, and he told a remarkable story that paralleled the One Minute Manager’s situation near exactly. And what follows is the story that astounded me.

Oncken described working long hours but never keeping up. Early one Saturday morning he got ready again to head for his office, telling his disappointed wife and children that he was sacrificing himself for their sakes. The office was gloriously quiet, no-one else there, and he poured into his work. Finally he paused. His office window looked across to the neighbouring golf course, and there he saw his staff getting ready to start their round. Oncken said: ‘They were teeing up, and I was teed off!’ He looked down at all the work on his desk, and gasped. These papers were not his work; it was their work he was about to do. With a jolt as if struck by lightning, it hit him: ‘They’re not working for me; I’m working for them!’ And with four of his staff producing work but passing it up to him, he’d never get caught up. The more he did, the more they would give him to do. He wasn’t behind with his work.  He was behind with their work.

Oncken finished his story by relating how, after realising whose work he was doing, he fled from his office, drove home and spent the rest of the weekend with his family. That Saturday night he slept so deeply that twice during the night his wife thought he was dead.

By now, you’ll have grasped the core theme of The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. I’ll stop summarising now, though I’ve given you only the highlights of just over one quarter of the book. I encourage you to get a copy and read it all.[2] It’s full of thoughtful insights and much wise guidance.

This blog post is the follow-up to my previous one on delegation. (See https://occasionallywise.com/?s=delegation) So, in what remains, I’ll add further comments on that subject, including some arising from points raised above.

Bosses must resist the temptation to go back to doing the fun work    The best managers are often people who’ve worked their way up through the ranks. They understand the issues at ground level, the place where the company’s work interacts with the concerns and wants of its customers. When they did that work, they performed well, so they were promoted and began overseeing the next generation of ground level workers. That is exactly as it should be, but it often leads to two problems.

  1. The leaders loved the down-in-the-trenches challenges of aligning products or services with customers’ needs and problems. It was tough but stimulating, and when it all went well generated a wonderful sense of achievement. Then they moved up the company hierarchy, and they lost that satisfaction. They’re sent reports of successes, but reports don’t generate gratification like they felt when they handled those contracts themselves. Therefore, managers face a massive temptation to dive back into the detail work their staff member should be handling. Such leaders tell themselves they’re just lending a hand, but their motives are suspect, and hijacking their subordinates’ jobs keeps them from their own work and deprives their staff of the experience and satisfaction which rightly belongs to them.
  2. The leaders I’m describing won their promotion to management by being good – really good – at their work. Perhaps they were the best sales person, or highest achieving accountant, or best machinist on the factory floor. Now, as managers, they see the workmanship of their staff and think, ‘I know the best approach’ or ‘I could do this so much better myself’ and, next thing, they’ve taken over the work. Again the result is that they’re neglecting their management-level work, and robbing staff members of the experience that comes only from trial and error learning moments.

It’s very hard for leaders to concentrate only on their own work, but they must.

There’s a real danger that a leader becomes a rescuer    The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey book defines a rescuer as ‘someone who was doing for others what they could do for themselves’. That has all the dangers I’ve just mentioned above, but also delivers a negative psychological verdict on their staff member’s work. When I rescued my two-year-old daughter who was out of her depth in a swimming pool, I did that because otherwise she’d have drowned. I had to save her because she couldn’t have saved herself. That’s exactly right. But what’s not right is taking over work someone is capable of doing. As the storyteller in the book says, when we do that we send the message to them they are ‘not okay’, that they’re so unable to handle a problem you have to take care of it for them.

They may not yet be as capable as their boss, but they’ll never have equal ability if the boss does their work.

 What if the staff member can’t handle the task you set?    In the last blog post I said delegation can happen only when someone is available and suitable. Here the issue is about suitability – a subordinate having the skills and experience necessary to do a job. If they don’t, and you still delegate to them, several questions are raised:

  1. Why are you delegating the job to someone who can’t do it?  If the task is outside someone’s skill set, they don’t fail. You do. Requiring them to do what you knew they couldn’t do is bad management. You have one less job in your in-tray, but the botched work of an inexperienced colleague will make everything worse. The badly done job won’t please you, or your boss, or your client. In fact, the client may move their work elsewhere, and you may soon be working elsewhere too.
  2. Why didn’t you know what your staff member was capable of doing?  Let me be charitable that you didn’t intentionally cause your colleague to fail. I’ve seen that done in order to have a reason to fire that person. It was not only wrong but also cruel. But, let’s assume you simply didn’t know the person’s capabilities. Well, you should have. If there’s a good reason why you can’t know their skills – such as when someone has only just joined the company – then either don’t delegate to them yet, or delegate only light tasks and gradually make them more substantial as you discover what they can do.
  3. What if they are capable but simply didn’t do the task or turned in sloppy work?  A case like that needs care. What if there’s some crisis at home for that employee? Or they’ve just been diagnosed with a serious medical condition? Or this poor piece of work is a complete exception, and everything else they’ve done has been very good? We need to think about Issues like these before we react. But let’s assume you have every reason to believe your staff member didn’t care, or gave scant attention to the task, or pretends they didn’t understand what they were supposed to do. I’ve known employees like that, guilty of culpable ignorance or culpable inability. Given the position they held, they should have known what to do and be able to do it. So, when work is either not done or done badly, that’s not a time to pretend it doesn’t matter, nor should we avoid confrontation by taking the job back and doing it ourself. One of the other One Minute Manager books makes it clear that if it takes two people to do what should be done by one, then someone is unnecessary. With your incompetent employee, you may wish to give another chance; you may be required to issue an official warning; you may be allowed and deem it necessary to bring their employment to an end. Whatever is appropriate, do it. Avoiding the issue is the worst of outcomes.

So, to finish, three last quick statements about delegation:

Anyone who tells you that delegation is simple doesn’t know much about delegation.

Done well, delegation puts the right work in front of the right people, which is good for job satisfaction and excellent workmanship.

Never feel guilty at giving work away, but you are guilty if you take work away from the person who should be doing it. That’s not good for you, nor productive for your business.

I wish you well in delegating wisely and often.

[1] Blanchard K, Oncken Wm, Burrows H (1990), The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey, London: Harper Collins Publishers.

[2] At the time of writing, it’s available in paperback for £6.99 in the UK, and used from $4.39 in the USA where the paperback version no longer appears to be for sale.

We do what we can

Flying over the Congo jungle is a mesmerizing experience. The WWF quotes the rainforest’s size at 500 million acres, which is a larger footprint than the whole of Alaska. All I could see was mile after mile of trees stretching into the distance.

Our group of about eight was in a small Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) plane, visiting places missionaries had established as ‘stations’ in the 1800s. We decided to abandon one planned visit because fighting had broken out nearby. Instead we’d go a day early to another village where there was no trouble. The pilot invited me to sit up front beside him.

We arrived over our new destination, a place no-one had flown into for many months. It was only what some would call ‘a hole in the jungle’ but as well as homes it had a church, a small hospital and a dirt airstrip. The pilot circled the plane several times, studying that airstrip. He was nervous about landing, or, more accurately, about whether we could take off again. Jungle encroaches on airstrips quickly from all sides, and though the pilot had been told the villagers had cut back the forest it didn’t look like they’d cut enough. He could land the plane, but he’d need more space to take off. We might be stuck there for days.

He decided to go for it, and down we went. The landing was bumpy, but no more than usual on dirt, and the plane came to rest at the end of the airstrip where enthusiastic villagers were waiting for us. The engine was switched off.

It was at exactly that moment about thirty men in army uniforms emerged from the jungle. Quickly they encircled our plane with their automatic weapons pointed at us. My front location got a perfect view of a trestle-mounted machine gun aimed right at the cockpit.

There are many militias in Congo, and there was no immediate way to know who these ‘soldiers’ were. Even government troops could be hostile. And these guys were seriously hostile.

A couple of our number got out to speak with them. A few minutes later they told us we must all get out. We clambered from the plane, and were marched at gunpoint towards the village. The people we’d come to see were super-excited, and sang and rushed back and forth in ways that clearly bothered our captors. My fear was that if they upset them too much, those soldiers might start shooting at random. Thankfully, it never came to that.

We got to the village, received a great welcome from village and church leaders and held a short service in the open air with gun wielding soldiers surrounding all of us. We were given food, and visited the hospital which, tragically, was very broken down but still the only facility which could care for people who might have walked for days through the jungle to get help.

At some point, a call of nature had to be answered. There was a toilet a couple of hundred yards away, but I wasn’t allowed to go alone. My soldier escort kept his weapon pointed in my direction even at my most vulnerable moment.

Apparently we’d aroused great suspicion because our changed plan meant we’d arrived on a day when we weren’t authorised. We couldn’t leave unless a commander from over the river permitted it. By late afternoon we were getting perilously near to sunset, and we couldn’t take off in the dark. Our MAF pilot was seriously afraid an overnight stay would result in his plane being stripped of essential components. That wouldn’t be good for the plane and not good for us because then we couldn’t leave at all.

With only half an hour before daylight would end, news arrived that the commander said we could go. ‘We’re leaving now’ said the pilot, with great emphasis on ‘now’. We were inside the plane in five minutes. The engine started, the plane lined up, and we set off down that airstrip at full power. No-one was sure we’d get into the air before we reached the jungle at the far end. The trees seemed to rush towards us. It looked impossible to miss them. Last second, the pilot pulled back on the stick and up we went, skimming the trees. We were airborne! I glanced out the window, and leaves from the jungle were hanging from the wing tips.

That visit was memorable. But, over the years, the suffering of ordinary people in Congo has been far more memorable than finding myself on the wrong end of soldiers’ guns.

What I also learned from that dramatic and life-threatening experience was a hard but important lesson: We are not as much in control of our lives as we think.

I have a passionate dislike of time management and life management books. Not because they lack any wisdom, but because of the core assumptions almost all of them contain: that we are masters of our destiny, and we can reach our goals if only we order our lives rightly.

I have an ethical problem with that, and believe there’s a major flaw in the logic.

My ethical problem is the inherent selfishness. One book praised the boss who had his secretary screen all incoming calls, and promise he’d return them between 4.00 and 5.00 in the afternoon. He wouldn’t call at any other time. That practice was praised as great time management. Yes, great for that boss, but not great for those told they had to make their schedules fit round his if they were to get his attention. I’ve seen similar advice given for answering emails. And I’ve known people willing to meet others only between hours they defined; if you couldn’t meet then, you didn’t meet at all.

Arrogant people must think they can make the world revolve around them. What if we universalized that form of time management, but all chose different times of the day to be available? Interactions would be impossible.

The flaw in much time and life management thinking is this. Let’s liken it to driving a fairground dodgem (bumper) car. And let’s imagine no other cars are on the track or they’re all stationary. Then driving would be easy. But real life isn’t a static dodgem track. It’s a dodgem track full of people driving crazily, right into our path, crashing us from the side and from behind, jarring our bones and almost toppling us over.

The hard reality is that we can’t regiment the world around us. No matter how good we are at strategizing, planning, organizing, life refuses to be ordered or controlled. The messy world we navigate has events and people crashing into us from all angles. None of us on that plane imagined we’d be surrounded by armed soldiers in a clearing in the jungle. No-one has ready-made strategies for extreme events like that, nor for hundreds of parallel though ordinary happenings in our lives.

So, what do we do? We can’t make problems melt away, and not every circumstance can have a happy ending. Therefore we do what we can. We try not to freeze or panic, or to sit down and moan about the unfairness of life. Probably most of us have surrendered to reactions like these sometimes. But nothing good comes that way.

My ‘we do what we can’ philosophy kicked in during the final stages of my theology degree. A large part of my overall mark depended on a 20,000 word dissertation. My future plans for PhD study also rested on that dissertation. But I was getting nowhere. After months of work the project would not come together. Then one day, out of the blue, a whole new angle on the subject flashed into my mind. But following that intuition would mean starting all over again. I described the new idea to Alison, but added, ‘There just isn’t enough time to do that now.’

‘Are you sure? What if you just start and see what you can do?’

She was right. And I did just start. The research went well, and the writing went well. There was a crisis when a friend typing my draft to dissertation standard suddenly went into hospital. But I found another typist, and the dissertation was handed in with two days to spare. It got good marks, and I was admitted to the PhD programme. In this world we don’t sail on a calm sea. We face storms. Some are minor and some major. Some won’t harm us and some threaten everything. In the Congo jungle I wasn’t in control of the outcome. It was a time to trust God and get on with doing what I could, which was spending time with deeply impoverished people. I’ve practised a ‘do everything you can’ approach many times now. It doesn’t make life easy, but it has meant I keep moving forward. And that’s a good thing.