There is a moment I see in nearly every small business I walk into.

Someone catches the boss in the corridor. Thirty seconds, not even a proper conversation. “Have you got a sec? We’ve got a problem with the Henderson job.”

And the boss, because he is a decent bloke and because he genuinely does know the answer, says the six most expensive words in business.

“Leave it with me. I’ll sort it.”

He has just done something kind. He has also just made his own week worse, and he will do it another eleven times before Friday.

The monkey

There is a piece of writing from 1974 that explains this better than anything I have read since. William Oncken and Donald Wass wrote it for Harvard Business Review under the title “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?” It is one of the most reprinted things that magazine has ever published, and I think that is because nobody has come up with a better picture in fifty years.

The monkey is the next move. Not the problem. Not the client. The next move.

Before that corridor chat, the monkey sat on your colleague’s back. Thirty seconds later it is on yours, and you are carrying it round the building.

Here is the sting. You now work for her. She will pop by on Thursday and ask, ever so nicely, how you got on with it. You have taken on a member of staff who reports to you, and handed her the right to chase you.

Do that with nine people and you have not got a business. You have got nine part-time bosses and a very full Sunday night.

I did this for years and called it being helpful

I was the man who sorted things. Whatever it was, bring it to me, I’ll have a look. I told myself that was leadership. Being available. Being decent.

It was people-pleasing wearing a nice suit.

Because the truth underneath it, and it took me a long time and a fair bit of pain to see this, was that I liked being needed. If everything came through me, then I mattered. Nothing moved without me, and I had quietly arranged it that way.

That is not a business. That is a cage you built and then hung a sign on.

Why they keep bringing you the monkey

Eric Berne’s work on transactional analysis gives the cleanest explanation I know. Every exchange between two people has a stance behind it. Parent, adult, or child.

When you take the problem off someone, however warmly, you are speaking as the parent. And the parent voice always gets the child response. Not because they are weak, but because that is the invitation you sent.

The next time they hit a problem, they will bring it straight to you. You taught them that. You were kind about it, so it did not feel like teaching, but that is exactly what it was.

Adult to adult sounds completely different. “What are you going to do?”

What to do on Monday

Oncken had a scale for this, and it is the most useful bit of the whole thing. Five levels of initiative:

1. Wait until told.
2. Ask what to do.
3. Recommend, then act.
4. Act, and tell you straight away.
5. Act, and tell you at the next catch-up.

Most people in most small businesses are stuck on level two. Not because they are not capable. Because level two is what gets rewarded every time they walk down that corridor.

So here is the whole job for next week. Move one person from two to three.

When they bring you a problem, do not solve it and do not send them away empty-handed either. Say this: “What do you reckon we should do?”

Then wait. Properly wait. The silence will feel like about a fortnight and it will be roughly four seconds.

Nine times out of ten they will tell you exactly what you were about to say. Then you say, “Good. Do that.” And the monkey walks out of the room on the back it arrived on.

The tenth time they will be wrong, and that is the important one, because now you are actually developing somebody instead of covering for them.

One rule for yourself while you are doing it. If it goes a bit sideways, it was your decision to let them run with it. Own that out loud, in front of people. Nobody takes the next monkey if the last one got them shouted at.

The bit that was always free

The funding for the main leadership apprenticeships went in September. Team Leader, Operations Manager, Coaching Professional. I sell leadership development for a living and I am still not going to call it a disaster, because the CMI reckon 82% of UK managers were never given any training anyway.

The course was never the thing.

Four seconds of silence in a corridor costs nothing, and it does more for a first-time manager than a folder ever did.

I have worked with well over two thousand coaches and it is the same pattern in every single organisation. The leaders who are drowning are not the ones with lazy teams. They are the ones whose teams have learned, quite reasonably, to bring everything to them.

So, honestly: whose monkey did you carry home last night?

If you want a proper think about what would change in your week if you stopped, that is exactly the sort of thing I talk through with people for half an hour, free, here.