I was chatting with a client recently and he looked shattered.

He'd spent the whole weekend rewriting a pitch document. Not his document... his team's. It landed on his desk not good enough, and rather than hand it back he rolled up his sleeves and did it himself.

"It's just easier if I do it," he said.

And on its own, fair enough. We've all done it. Big pitch, tight deadline, a document that isn't there yet. You just get it done.

But this wasn't the first time. Or the second.

It reminded me of an old story about monkeys.

Who's got the monkey?

Back in 1974 two American management writers, William Oncken Jr and Donald Wass, wrote a piece for Harvard Business Review called Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? Fifty years on it still works, because it describes something every leader has done.

You're walking down the corridor and one of your team stops you with a problem. As they talk, picture a noisy monkey sitting on their shoulder, grinning at you. While they explain, the monkey gets one foot across onto your shoulder. Then you say the magic words... "Leave it with me."

And the monkey jumps.

It's your monkey now. You have to feed it. A few days later your team member pops their head round the door: "Hey, how's that thing going?" Now they're checking up on you. (Staff these days!)

Do that often enough and you're carrying a cage full of hungry monkeys, all chattering in your ear, all eating the time you were meant to spend working on the business rather than in it.

These days the corridor's mostly gone. The monkeys arrive by Teams message at nine at night. Same monkey, faster jump.

Quick test. How often do you say:

  • "Leave it with me"
  • "Let me think about that"
  • "I'll get back to you"
  • "Flick me an email on that"
  • "I'll have a word with him for you"

If the honest answer is "often", you're a monkey collector. I know the feeling. I'm the imperfect coach, after all.

For me it used to show up at home. Leaping in to help my kids. Racing up to school with the PE gear that had been left at home... again. Felt like good parenting at the time. Hell, I don't know. Maybe it was. But guess who never had to remember their PE gear?

So why do we keep catching them?

Oncken and Wass are great on the what and the how. What they don't really get into is why smart, capable leaders keep putting their hand up.

For that I go to a psychiatrist called Stephen Karpman. In 1968 he described what's now known as the Drama Triangle. Three roles we slip into when things get tricky:

  • The Victim — "it's too hard, I can't"
  • The Rescuer — "don't worry, I'll sort it"
  • The Persecutor — "why can't anyone round here get it right?"

The catch is nobody stays in one corner. We move around it.

Now look at my client's weekend again. The team hands over a pitch that isn't quite there. He swoops in and saves it. Classic Rescuer. And it feels good! Being the one who fixes things is a fair part of why most of us ended up running a business in the first place.

But by the third or fourth weekend the Rescuer gets tired. Then a bit resentful. And then you hear yourself saying it... "why do I have to do everything round here?" That's the Persecutor talking. Same leader, every corner of the triangle, and the team learns exactly one lesson: if it's not quite right, the boss will fix it.

That's the bit that stings. The rescuing is what keeps the team needing rescue. It's how the business still lives in your head.

Not my monkey... but it is my circus

An old mate of mine used to say "not my monkey, not my circus." Usually as he walked away from someone else's mess.

For a leader or owner it's only half right. It is your circus... but it's still not your monkey! Your job isn't to feed every monkey. It's to build a team that can feed their own.

The Oncken and Wass fix is simple, and I've seen it work plenty of times:

Know your own priorities. For the day, for the week. Don't get bumped off them by someone else's monkey.

Don't take the monkey, set a feeding time. "Sounds like you've got an issue there. Come and see me at 3 with a couple of options."

At feeding time, coach. "Some of that's good. Have you thought about...? Have another crack and let's talk Friday after lunch."

If it's not worth feeding, shoot it. "Is this actually a problem? What's the reason we're spending time on it?"

Coach, don't Play!

There's a later take on Karpman's triangle, from a writer called David Emerald, that I really like. He turns the Rescuer into a Coach. Same instinct to help, pointed somewhere useful. Instead of fixing the problem, you help the other person get better at fixing it.

In my experience this is the moment owners and leaders really start working effectively. It takes a bit more of your time at the start. It saves heaps later.

My kids are grown up now and, as far as I know, they all remember their own PE gear. Funny that.

Your team will too... once you stop driving it up to school.

Good luck out there. And don't forget to have fun!

Ben

Ben Marris is an advisor, coach and mentor to ambitious New Zealand CEOs, leaders and business owners. He has owned businesses and worked with business owners since the turn of the century. He gets leadership teams onto the same picture of where the business is going, then into a plan people actually act on. DM him and he'll set up a call, or have a look at marris.co.nz.

He loves red wine and a good story. He is also dyslexic, so if there are any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors blame his spell check, he does.