HBR - Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?
The burdens of subordinates always seem to end up on the manager’s back.
Get control over the timing and content of what you do!
Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? article from Harvard Business Review is one of the most popular articles on management. This talks about manager struggling to manage time while team members are waiting for manager’s feedback. So, in a way manager becomes the bottleneck without even understanding it!
We always see few managers always working late hours, replying to tons of emails, running multiple things, while their team members are always stuck and waiting for feedback, approval from managers. In few cases like critical issues, project failing to meet deadlines, managers taking up the ownership and driving everything may make sense. But, in regular day to day work, it is the sign of micromanagement, lack/ fear of delegation.
Making Time for Gorillas
Stephen R. Covey had provided a commentary to original article with title “Making Time for Gorillas”. This talks about few aspects which are not covered by original paper.
One aspect where team members do not take initiative is due to fear of failing. There should be a team culture and there should be a sense of partnership.
This commentary also talks about psychological aspects of a manger afraid to give up the control of the monkey.
Following are my thoughts on the article:
Knowledge Management Systems
In case of legacy software systems, it is more likely for managers to be take up the monkey due to team members lacking the understanding of the system. In these case knowledge management systems play very important role. Manager can point to required wiki pages, documented workflows, project notebooks etc. and then team member can go through these and try to understand the system without much help from manager. Training sessions are also very important in that regards.
Effective Communication
Team member who take up the responsibilities (highest initiative degree) need a way to communicate the progress. Regular meetings will help them to convey these.
Email is now a days the biggest communication mechanism to transfer monkey. A manager needs to be watchful if he/she has habit of answering each and everything even if assigned team member is in loop!
Effective On-boarding Process
I think this also plays a good part in managing subordinate-imposed time if you are working with interns or new hires out of college. Effective on-boarding process ensures that new team members have pointers about how and where to locate information. Routine things like programming environments, tools, source code management may sound trivial, but present bottlenecks for new members and then unless they know where to find required information or whom to refer to, they turn back to manager.
Getting New Programmers Started Off Right chapter from Managing the Unmanageable book has very useful tips like assigning a mentor and buddy.
Managing the Innovation
Managers need to demonstrate technical leadership as well. So, bringing in new technologies, processes in one of the role. This will go under self-imposed time for manager initiatives.
In few cases, manager may need to take his/ her initiative till establishment step and then delegate maintenance. However, it is very important to keep team members informed/ involved in the entire process as they can learn from the experience and then it will prepare them to take up new initiatives by themselves.
Reverse Mentoring is also a good way to keep up with new technologies.
Repetitive Monkeys
Many times manager spend up subordinate-imposed time for similar tasks. Following can be the reasons from manager’s side:
- Lack of clarity in task
- Lack of training so that assigned team member is not able to understand/ carry out task
- Lack of documentation or knowledge management system which can help assigned member
- Lack of confidence or trust