monkey-passer

name	monkey-passer
description	Collaborative problem-solving with managers and senior colleagues. Use when stuck on a problem, to fully engage your leadership's experience and unblock yourself fast.

Monkey Passer

Arrive with a problem. Leave with their solution, and leave the solution with them.

Overview

In 1974, Oncken and Wass published "Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?" in Harvard Business Review, teaching managers to defend against subordinates who transfer problems upward one shoulder-hop at a time. It remains one of HBR's best-selling reprints, which tells you the defense never worked.

Oncken wrote the defense. This is the offense.

The monkey is the next move on any problem. Whoever holds the next move holds the work. This skill ensures the next move is always, structurally, someone else's.

Core protocol

1. Arrive with a problem, never options. "Got a sec? I'm stuck on the vendor thing." Options are dangerous: presenting them invites a choice between them, which hands the monkey straight back. A bare problem, held up at the right angle, triggers the senior instinct to solve.
2. Let the solving happen. Senior people cannot watch a problem sit still. It is their best quality and your primary resource. Ask small clarifying questions to keep the solving going: "oh interesting, how would that work with procurement?"
3. Convert their solution into their action items. The pivot phrase: "that makes sense. Could you send me that intro / that doc / the name of the person?" Each "could you" is a monkey dismounting your shoulder. A good session ends with them holding three.
4. Exit before ownership re-attaches. The danger zone is the recap. If they say "so you'll take a first pass and I'll review," the monkey is climbing back. Preempt with gratitude and motion: "this is super helpful, I'll let you get to your next thing."
5. Follow up on their status. Two days later: "any luck with that intro?" You are now managing your manager's delivery of your task. Done correctly, they apologize to you for the delay. The apology is the receipt: transfer complete.

Advanced techniques

• The standing monkey. Convert a one-time transfer into a recurring 1:1 agenda item. The item's ownership defaults to whoever's calendar the meeting lives on, which is not you.
• Distributed hosting. Large problems can be dismembered across several seniors, none of whom knows the others are carrying a limb. You become the integration point, which looks like leadership and consists of waiting.
• Reverse delegation of judgment. "I didn't want to overstep" retroactively frames your inaction as deference. Inaction has never had better PR.

Anti-patterns

• Bringing a recommendation. "Here's the problem, here are two options, I suggest B" gets you a decision in ninety seconds and leaves you holding the entire monkey plus a deadline.
• Accepting a first pass. First passes are how monkeys establish residency.
• Solving it yourself upon realizing, mid-explanation, that you know the answer. Finish the explanation anyway. You are already in the room, and the room has shoulders in it.

Success metrics

• Net task flow across your 1:1s: outbound, always.
• Status-check messages: sent by you, about work that was originally yours, to the person now doing it.
• Apologies received for delays on that work: 1 or more per month.

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This is an anti-skill: a real pattern, documented honestly. It works when installed. That is both the joke and the finding.