“Taking the work that others should be doing as a result of incorrect notions of the role of manager, the need for control, and the need to be seen as helpful, creates a cycle of dependency upon the manager.”
- We all know about the managerial saying, “a monkey on my back,” coined by William Oncken Jr. years ago. A “monkey” is defined as the work to be done. For managers, doing the employee’s work – upward delegation – is taking on “inappropriate monkeys.”
There are several reasons managers accept monkeys:
- I can do it better.
- I can do it faster.
- I’ve done it before and I enjoy it.
- I don’t really trust the employee to do it right.
- The employee might not know how to do it.
Regardless of the rationale or good intention, these ways of thinking create a situation where the supervisor must continue to do the employees’ work. The employee can’t learn or develop, and the manager must waste critical management time that could have been spent on the manager’s more critical responsibilities.
While well-intended, taking employees’ “monkeys” leads to very negative unintended consequences:
- Employees are not developed.
- Employees learn to bring everything to the boss rather than make an effort to work things through on their own.
- No innovation or creativity in how tasks get done – manager does it his/her old way.
- Responsibility and accountability for work is shifted from employee to supervisor.
Perhaps the most negative result of doing work that employees should be doing is the creation of a culture of dependency – where the employee depends on the manager to tackle all the tough issues, get things done, and make all the decisions. This is the antithesis to superior performance, and it erodes personal initiative and responsibility in the workplace. Initiative and responsibility are highly desired employee qualities, and managers can often be unaware that they are inadvertently discouraging initiative and responsibility.