Day 269 - Don't Take That Monkey!

160.5 on the scale. 10.75 miles biking on the path, 150/100.

40 degrees this morning, and I was wearing shorts! Brrrrrrr!

So I stopped at Caribou as I usually do in the mornings, and as I was standing at the register ordering my coffee, a guy in front of the other register turned and said to me, "Hey! You're the Ham & Eggs Guy?".

I turned and recognized him instantly as a guy I talked to in that very Caribou well over a month ago while I was working on some stuff. I poked jovially at him and said, "Yeah! It's Ham in the Fridge, but you remembered! Nice!"

When we talked last time, we talked about business stuff and our roles at our companies. Turns out the guy was layed off from the small company he was at since I last talked to him and is searching for his next management position.

Today he recommended an article from the Harvard Business Review that reminded him of me and where HAM was as a company, from last time we talked. It's about how managers have to be very conscious about "taking the monkey off the back" of an employee when he or she approaches you with a problem. Our role is not to take that monkey, but to validate, redirect, or advise an employee to deal with the monkey in the best way themselves, which is what we hired them to do.

He was gonna scan it and email it to me so I can actually read it. It sounds interesting, and something that I think would be very helpful to read.

It's very easy to take everyone else's monkeys off their backs and end up with too many on your own, and in my experience, it happens for a couple of reasons:

1) You sympathize with the struggle the employee is having and wish they weren't having it, and so you want to help alleviate the stress. You take the monkey.

2) More often than not, you're strapped for time, and sometimes it feels faster and more efficient in the short term to deal with something ourselves rather than take the time to explain or instruct the employee to manage it on their own. You take the monkey.

I'm pretty lucky in that most of my employees are sensitive to the fact that I historically take too goddamn many monkeys that perhaps I shouldn't, but every now and then when we're really busy they and I forget and we fall into the trap that ultimately amounts to balls getting dropped and me being a stopgap in the organization.

So, I continue to work hard at not taking the monkeys, and work on advising them and validating their ideas about how to carry the load themselves. More often than not, they have the right answer, they just need validation.