The Monkey Manager: Keep the Monkey Where It Belongs

Every problem lands on your desk

It feels like leadership. Someone's stuck, you step in, you carry it. It even feels good in the moment — needed, capable, decisive.

Then you look up and every open problem on the floor is somehow yours. You've become the bottleneck, and the crew has learned that the fastest way to get rid of a problem is to hand it to you.

Whose monkey is it?

Ken Blanchard's The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey gives us the perfect image: every problem is a monkey on someone's back. The trouble starts when a manager lets their people's monkeys leap onto their own shoulders, one "leave it with me" at a time.

Soon the manager is feeding a zoo, working late to care for animals that were never theirs, while their people wait — freed of the very responsibility that would have grown them.

Don't absorb the monkey

The anchor is simple and hard: keep the monkey on the back it came in on. When someone brings you a problem, the goal is not to take it — it's to send them away still owning it, with a clear next move.

You are not refusing to help. You're refusing to let helping quietly transfer ownership. The monkey leaves the conversation on their shoulder, better fed, with a plan.

From doing to developing

A transactional manager solves; a developing leader builds solvers. Every monkey you absorb is a rep you steal from someone who needed it to grow.

This is the crew experience at its core: people take pride in owning outcomes, not in handing them off. When you keep the monkey with the team, you're not being cold — you're telling them you believe they can carry it. That belief is worth more than the rescue.

Managing the monkeys

• When a problem arrives, ask "What do you think we should do?" before you say anything else.
• End every problem conversation by naming who owns the next move — and make sure it's rarely you.
• Coach the person, not the problem: your job is their thinking, not their to-do list.
• Set a "no monkey drop-off" standard: bring me a problem and at least one proposed move.
• Protect blocks of your time for leader-work; a calendar full of other people's monkeys isn't leadership, it's absorption.

Feed your own work

Your job is not to carry the whole floor on your back. It's to build a crew that carries its own — and to protect the time only you can spend leading them.

Keep the monkey where it belongs. Everyone grows.