Stop Solving Everyone's Problems

My all time favorite Harvard Business Review article was first published 50 years ago this year.

​Managers Time: Who’s Got the Monkey is a brilliant piece of writing.

That’s the gist of it is that if you’re a manager you, you should never take the monkey (problem) of the back of your subordinates. Instead you should schedule regular feeding times and make sure your subordinates monkeys are well maintained (by asking questions and giving direction in person).

Handling monkeys is not enough

It also touches on a topic that I think is not talked about enough in the article. Most people asking you to solve their problem do so not because they don’t have it in them to solve it themselves. They bring you their problem because they are afraid to do the wrong thing.

That’s a lack of clarity and the problem you need to solve. The article states that you should do this by scheduling times to talk about the problems your subordinates have (talk, not email or Slack or Teams).

While scheduling regular monkey-feeding sessions helps, there’s a more scalable solution: Creating such clarity through values that your team rarely needs to bring you their monkeys at all. When everyone understands the principles that should guide their decisions, most problems solve themselves before they ever reach your desk.

These concepts can seem abstract, but let’s look at how this could work in practice.

Culture at Zappos

Zappos number one core value is Deliver WOW through service. This sounds great. Who doesn’t want to WOW their customers? Thing is Zappos doesn’t stop at placing a word on the wall. To start they have a program called School of Wow to teach new employees what WOW means in the context of Zappos and how they deliver it to their customers.

This leads to customer support agent upgrading shipping to get shoes to a customer in time for a special event, or even let customers keep shoes when there has been a mistake in the order.

If that isn’t enough for you, they also offered $2000 for employees to quit after training if they felt the culture wasn’t right for them.

Some people might read these stories about Zappos and come to the conclusion that they should be nice to their customers. This is the wrong takeaway.

The deeper lesson is the power that comes with aligning culture. When everyone knows how to act there is minimal friction and the company can move at an extreme speed.

What does that speed look like, you ask? In ten years Zappos went from $0 to over $1 billion in revenue and got bought by Amazon for $1.2 billion.

Wrap up

The true power of cultural clarity isn’t just in managing monkeys—it’s in preventing them from appearing in the first place.

When values are clear and deeply embedded, decisions become automatic, problems solve themselves, and leaders can focus on what truly matters: steering the organization forward.

Fifty years after "Management Time", perhaps the best monkey management is ensuring they never need to land on anyone’s back at all.