Leaders must resist the temptation to solve every problem that their team encounters
Writing Julie Smith
External volatility, emergent strategy, ambitious targets, organizational restructuring and redundancies: this is the context I hear about in my coaching room, from leaders across geographies and industries. Against this backdrop of challenge and unpredictability, you need your team to be confident. You need them to make decisions without you, to solve problems without escalating them, and to keep moving forward through ambiguity. Unfortunately, the extreme pressure often encourages leaders to interact with team members in ways that inadvertently end up undermining confidence.
Why the monkey matters
What is a monkey and how might it instill confidence in your team? Well, a monkey is the responsibility for the issue at hand. When a team member brings you a problem and you tell them what to do, or say, “I’ll sort that out,” you’ve taken the monkey.
As a one-off, that’s no big deal. Sometimes, it’s absolutely the right thing to do. There will be problems flagged by your team that are yours to take on – monkeys that belong to you. You might also make a judgment that there’s good reason to step forward and pick up something that is usually a team member’s responsibility; perhaps the individual is in the midst of a high-stakes project and doesn’t have the capacity to take on anything more.
The problem comes when taking the monkey becomes a pattern. Team members bring problems and you solve them. You become a very busy problem-solver. Your team becomes good at escalating and implementing – but never builds the confidence-enhancing skills of problem-solving, ownership and initiative. You accidentally convey the message that they aren’t capable of figuring things out on their own, giving them reason to question their own abilities. That’s confidence-sapping.
Five monkey grabbers
There are five common reasons why leaders find themselves reaching forward and grabbing a monkey that rightfully belongs to a team member. They pop up frequently because there’s a positive intention embedded in all of them.
Pace You want to deliver speedy results (and assume it’s quicker to do it yourself)
Standards You want to deliver high-quality work (and assume the best way to guarantee high standards is to do it yourself)
Problem focus You want to put your skills to good use (and assume your team members can’t solve the problems themselves)
Accountability You want to fulfill your leadership responsibility (and assume that it’s your job to fix things)
Helpfulness You want to support your team (and assume that by taking the monkey you’re being helpful)
It’s the text in brackets that is problematic – the assumption that leads us to believe that taking the monkey is the way to fulfill our positive intention to deliver pace, maintain high standards, and so on. If any resonated with you, consider potential alternative assumptions to keep your monkey-grabbing instincts in check.
Pace If I coach today, I’ll free up my time in the future
Standards Clear expectations plus coaching will drive high standards in the team
Problem focus Practice is the only way for the team to strengthen their problem-solving skills
Accountability It’s my job to develop my team’s capacity to fix things
Helpfulness The best help I can offer is to support them to find their own answer and build their skill
Offer coaching
Of course, the alternative to grabbing the monkey is not to abandon your team members to grapple with tricky problems alone. Instead, leave the monkey with them and offer your support through three powerful coaching habits.
Favor asking over telling Most of us bristle when we’re told what to do. Telling carries an unspoken judgment: you need to be told because you can’t figure it out for yourself. Asking signals interest and respect: it assumes the other person has something worthwhile to contribute.
Listen up Your thought-provoking questions will elicit thinking out loud by your team member. Your job, when they are sharing their emergent thinking, is to tune out distractions and listen carefully.
Allow silence Just because your team member has stopped speaking doesn’t mean they have stopped thinking. A few moments of silence may enable them to grasp an idea that was previously just beyond their reach.
When you coach your team members, you demonstrate your confidence in them and transmit powerful messages: “I value your experience and expertise; I’m interested in your point of view; I know that you can figure things out.”
Over time, this kind of demonstration of confidence becomes infectious, bolstering the individual’s self-trust. By giving them the opportunity to work their way through something challenging, rather than merely executing your instructions, you offer them access to new information about themselves. They might surprise themselves with their ability to do tricky things, growing their confidence with an ever-expanding mental list of reasons to think: “If I can do that, then I can do more.”
That’s exactly the kind of self-belief and openness to possibility that’s needed as you and your team face challenge and uncertainty together.
Julie Smith is founder of Talent Sprout and author of Contagious Confidence: A Leader’s Guide to Building Belief and Powering Potential (Practical Inspiration Publishing)
