Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Delegation--The Second Skill: Not My Monkey

As regular visitors to singularitymanagerzine.blogspot.com have come to know, there is research that suggests that feedback is the single most important skill for a manager to master and practice.  The benefits are many:  clarity, performance improvement, a sense of openness, fairness, motivation.  From our work with many managers over the past year, we have come to value the second most important manager skill.  It has to do with getting rid of monkeys.

We received a call from a far-flung reader with a monkey problem. He had three direct reports who were managers themselves.  Each had some heavy new responsibilities that had been spread around to remaining managers after a series of lay-offs.  Turns out, they were not shy about getting him involved with their work. “Can you please review this before I send it out?” was a typical request. “I’ve got a problem. Here’s what happens” was another. Pretty soon, their work became his work, and his time was not his own.

What is happening here is a classic back and forth game of who has responsibility.  The subordinate puts the “monkey”—the responsibility-- on the manager when he/she asks for a review or when the boss is asked to solve a problem.  When a manger picks up the monkey from a direct report, he or she is literally working for the subordinate.  The manager’s time is being taken up by a subordinate’s work.  Something is wrong with this picture

That Awful Buzzword

 William Oncke, Jr., and Donald Wass wrote a landmark article for the Harvard Business Review that should be tacked on every manager’s cubicle wall. “Who’s Got The Monkey?” (HBR, November-December 1974) is a tale of delegation gone wrong.  

The idea of delegation is to give responsibility to direct reports without having that responsibility come back to the manager.  That’s the essence of empowerment, that awful buzz word.  Taking on that responsibility may take some learning on the part of the subordinate, even some risk taking and hand holding.  But that’s where the responsibility has to stay.  Of course, the manager is still there for advice and help with the proviso that the monkey stays on the direct report’s back.  Such is the nature of effective delegation.

Distortions in Delegation

 Obviously, when people are new to work responsibilities, they are going to need some level of direction and guidance.  You’d think that would be a given, but there seems to be a range of approaches to how that is done in the real world of work. 

For example, we know some managers who embrace a “sink or swim” approach; definitely no monkeys here.  Part of their rationale is that new people need to struggle with the organizational way of doing things, and, in the process, create a network as well as some independence.  The problem with that is time to proficiency can be long, errors can get baked into a new person’s approach, the delegatee can become frustrated and may become a performance problem later on.  Besides, the final results of sink or swim will probably conflict with the boss’ expectations. 

Another delegation model is related to sink or swim:  “Bring me a rock, I will tell you when you’ve got the right one”.  That means the manager asks the new person to “try it” without specifying what success looks like.  What comes back is an approximation of what was wanted, the task winds up being done several times.  The boss’ rationale may be because he/she doesn’t know him/herself what is wanted or hasn’t been mindful enough to articulate the kind of outcome needed.  Or, he/she is just too busy, or it isn’t a priority, or he/she assumes that everyone should know how to do this, etc.

Of course, when the opposite approach to these hands-off methods is used, the delegatee unconsciously shifts the task to the boss because of insecurity, lack of confidence, or fear, and the boss winds up doing most it.  This is the monkey transfer problem.  When it’s all over, the boss thinks “I should have done this myself to begin with”.  So, the boss loses confidence in delegation as a management tool, and the new person has learned to become dependent--a "leaning learner".  Eventually, the boss goes home later and later, wondering why he/she is doing someone else’s job.


Be Monkey-Free, But Still Effective As A Delegator


Our work with managers has revealed four basic considerations in delegating well. Try these to keep the monkeys off your back.

Pick the right task to delegate.  If the task has vague objectives, uncertain
process, the need to work with an adversarial group, and a relatively high risk of failure, pass on delegation. Or at least, be prepared to become highly involved.

Provide the delegatee with just the right amount of direction.  An inexperienced person needs more guidance than a veteran. In addition to knowing the objective, tell the neophyte what to do and how to do it.  If you did that to a person who is experienced in a particular task, it would come across as micro managing.  Very Dilbert.

Plan your involvement. This is where you create some guidelines about what your role will be vis-à-vis the delegated task.  Progress reviews, access for advice and support, help in opening doors, etc., should all be spelled out.

Monkey rules.  Establish the ground rule that the person being delegated to has responsibility for execution, that you, the manager, are available as defined, and that monkeys are non-transferable.