Monkeys do not just hop around trees. Sometimes, they hop onto people's backs.
And at Venture Center’s 10th Journal Club, we got a rather literal demonstration of just how easily that can happen.
As we entered the Venture Center Library, one of our two speakers and the brainchild behind the Journal Club, Jagadish Bennale, was already carrying two monkeys on his back. Our second speaker, Rohit Joshi, then kicked off the session with an activity built around a human organisational structure and a series of seemingly unsolvable problems.
What happened next was almost too predictable.
The problems started travelling upwards.
And upwards.
And, unsurprisingly, upwards.
The jungle had deepened.
So, Who Has Got the Monkey?
The activity was a fitting introduction to William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass’s Harvard Business Review classic, Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?
The premise is wonderfully simple.
A monkey is the next move in a problem.
An employee walks up to a manager :
“We have a problem.”
The manager listens. They want to help. They want to move things along.
Then comes the seemingly harmless sentence :
“Leave it with me.”
Hop.
The monkey has moved.
The employee walks away. The manager walks away with a new responsibility.
A few days later comes the inevitable :
“Just checking if there is an update?”
Of course there is.
The monkey now has a follow-up calendar.
And this is where the article becomes particularly relevant for anyone in a managerial role. Managers do not necessarily become overwhelmed because they are bad at managing time. They can become overwhelmed because they keep accepting responsibility for the next move in problems that their teams should be owning.
When the Organisational Ladder Becomes a Monkey Ladder
Oncken and Wass divide management time into three broad categories: boss-imposed, system-imposed and self-imposed time.
Boss-imposed time is what your boss requires. System-imposed time comes from the wider organisation: colleagues, coordination, meetings, processes and all the machinery required to keep things moving.
Then there is self-imposed time, the portion managers have more control over.
Except that some of it gets quietly eaten up by subordinate-imposed work.
A manager starts the day thinking:
Today, I will finally work on that strategic problem.
Then:
10:15: “Can you approve this?”
11:30: “What should I do about this?”
1:00: “Could you follow up with them?”
3:00: “Just wanted your thoughts.”
By evening, the manager has solved everyone else’s problems and somehow has not touched the one that actually required managerial attention.
The monkeys have been busy.
Five Ways to Keep the Monkey Where It Belongs
The article offers five levels of initiative, showing how responsibility can move from dependence towards ownership.
- Wait until you are told what to do - The manager supplies the direction, decision and momentum.
- Ask what you should do - The employee identifies the problem but hands over the decision.
- Recommend a course of action, then act - The problem arrives with a proposed solution attached.
- Act, then advise immediately - The employee takes the decision and keeps the manager informed.
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Act independently and report routinely - The employee owns the work; the manager gets visibility without having to supervise every move.
The progression is wonderfully straightforward :
“Tell me.” → “What should I do?” → “I recommend this.” → “I have done it.” → “It is handled.” For managers, that shift matters. The goal is not to stop helping people. It is to help people become capable of carrying their own monkeys.
And Then There Is the Crocodile
Because no jungle metaphor should be allowed to leave without a crocodile. Imagine a manager sitting beside a river, surrounded by monkeys.
One needs an approval.
One needs a decision.
One needs a follow-up.
Another has a “quick question” that has somehow become a 40-minute conversation.
The manager is so busy managing monkeys that they do not notice the crocodile approaching.
The crocodile is the work that genuinely needs the manager: the strategic decision, the difficult conversation, the important opportunity, the problem that cannot be delegated.
And perhaps that is the bigger takeaway from our Journal Club discussion.
The danger is not simply carrying too much work. It is carrying work that is not yours while the work that is yours grows teeth.
So, to every manager who has ever wondered where the day went, perhaps the first question is not :
“How do I manage my time better?”
It is :
“Whose monkey am I carrying?” Because monkeys may have started in the trees.
At Venture Center’s Journal Club, we discovered that they have since made it all the way up the organisational ladder.
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