If you've been managing people for any length of time, then you will have probably encountered the four words that easily trip off your tongue. But that can ruin your day. If you ever heard yourself saying, leave it with me. It's easy to say a colleague comes up to you and asks you for your help, but you're busy. You don't have time to help them. So in order to satisfy them, and avoid having to hang around and deal with a problem now, outcome, those words, leave it with me.

The problem with that is that when you get back to your desk, you've now got another problem. And William uncongenial liking that problem, to having a monkey sitting on your shoulder That monkey belong to one of your colleagues. But when you said, leave it with me, it hopped onto your shoulder. And now you're putting that monkey on your desk, along with all the other monkeys on your desk, other colleagues whose work they've left with you. And right at the back of that desk, struggling for air, feeling unloved are your own monkeys, the work that you really ought to be doing. It's kind of like reverse delegation.

You're the boss. But all your team members are leaving it with you. So what do we do about it? We uh monken in coining the metaphor of the monkey also gave us a four step process for dealing with monkeys, sometimes known as monkey management. And the first step is to describe the monkey uncon defines a monkey as the next step. If you can define what the next step is in any piece of work, then you're partway there.

The next thing to do is to assign an owner to the next step to the monkey. And here's the secret. The narrower you define the next step. Almost certainly, the safer it is to assign that next step to a more junior person. So if someone asks you for some help, and you define that monkey as a small, simple, low risk next step, then you can assign it back to them. Go away, do some research and come to my office at three o'clock to discuss it.

That's a next step with no risk. The monkey is still on their shoulder. You've got away with it. But the task is under proper control. In assigning the monkey the next step, the third Step is to take out insurance. That's the phrase that often uses.

And what he means by this is to make sure that the risks associated with the task with the monkey are properly managed. That means that if there are risks for the other person in doing it, you've thought about both. So think about the level of responsibility you're giving them. Are you going to give them responsibility to do something unsupervised? Or perhaps, to take the first steps, or maybe to consider what the first steps might be, and then come back to you. And finally, the fourth step is to check up on the monkey to make sure the monkey has been properly cared for.

So if you allocate a piece of work, make sure in that process, you've set a time when you will go back and talk to your colleague about what they've done and how it's working. It's essential when you assign the monkey it's been really Clear who's got it, the last thing you want is for that monkey to be unsure whether it's going to be on your shoulder or on theirs. Because if it doesn't know, then it'll have one foot on your shoulder, one foot on theirs. And when you walk in opposite directions, the poor monkey we left on the floor and loved your belief, they're going to do it, they'll believe you're going to do it. And where are you? You're off down the corridor, feeling free of the monkey.

So they, the monkey will not get tended, will not get cared for, and now you have a risk. So monkey management is all about assigning the monkeys, it's about rejecting monkeys that ought not to be on your shoulder and giving them back appropriately. And if you think about it, what delegation really is, is taking a whole family of monkeys that are on your shoulder, they are your monkeys and handing them over. to a colleague to take care of for you, you assign those monkeys, you take out proper insurance. A check up on that nutshell is going to be the theme of this program.