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September 10, 2019 By Darcy Luoma

Got a backpack full of monkeys?

Your colleague walks into your office complaining that they haven’t been able to get the feedback they need from the rest of the team and are in danger of missing a deadline. Before you know it, you have agreed to send a message reminding everyone to get their feedback in and promise to notify your colleague when you’ve heard back from everyone. 

Look at you, problem solver. Getting things done!

Except now you’ll spend lots of time that you need for your own work solving someone else’s problem. Oops.

The Problem With Being a Problem Solver

This used to be me all the time, every day. When I first started managing Senator Kohl’s office, I was in charge of a staff for the first time ever. I wanted to make sure I seemed like I knew what I was doing, so I committed myself to being the Chief Problem Solver.

The challenge is that Senators’ offices are really nothing but problems that need solving. So, eventually, I was trying to do my job and all the hardest parts of everyone else’s.

And then I read an article that totally clicked for me. Along with the coach training I was doing, it helped change my behavior. In fact, I found it so useful that I am still using it when teaching 20 years later! I noticed that it has been resonating with a lot of people recently, so I wanted to share it with you.

No More Monkeys

The article is Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?. I’m not its only fan; it was originally published in 1974 and then appeared as a favorite classic reprinted in 1999. It’s a really good article.

While it’s definitely worth your time to read the whole thing, I’ll give you a partial Cliff’s notes version. In the discussion of time management, it focuses on why managers never seem to have enough time, while their team doesn’t have enough work. 

Why is this? If we envision problems as monkeys, what happens is that people tell their managers about a problem, and the manager agrees to help, or at least to think it over and follow up. And now? The monkey is transferred to the manager’s back.

If you keep this up, eventually your office will be a zoo, and you’ll have no time to focus on what’s important. 

Send Those Monkeys Back

How do you keep from taking on everyone else’s problems? The article has some suggestions, but if you ask me it really comes down to using coaching. Rather than jumping in to fix and solve, ask your colleague some questions to help them get closer to figuring it out on their own. Hold them as the expert.

In the Senator’s office, I started telling people that if they brought me a problem, they also needed to bring a few ideas about how to solve it. Then we could spend time discussing solutions, and they could leave with a good idea about how to proceed (but with the monkey still firmly planted on their back, not mine!).

What I noticed is that after a while, my staff understood that I wasn’t going to take all the monkeys off their back, so they stopped trying. They got better at identifying solutions and moving things forward. They chose the solutions and came to me for a final okay, rather than at the beginning when everything was still a mess. Not only did I have more time, but I had empowered, engaged employees! AND the solutions were better.

Next time someone walks into your office with a monkey on their back, don’t take it, no matter how tempting it is! 

Leave the ball in their court and the monkey on their back. If they are used to you being a fixer they might push back. But if you stay curious and encouraging, you can be helpful without ending up with an office full of monkeys.

 

Download our FREE three-part video series, Getting Through Crisis with Thoughtfully Fit, and start your journey to being more intentional and bringing your best self to every situation!

Filed Under: Coaching, Executive Coaching, Thoughtfully Fit, Training Tagged With: business coach approach, coach boss, coaching as a management style, executive coaching, leadership, thoughtful manager, thoughtfully fit

June 11, 2019 By Darcy Luoma

Feedback isn’t working 76% of the time

A recent Gallup Workplace article titled Feedback Is Not Enough says that “only 24% of workers strongly agree that the feedback they receive helps them do better work”.

That means that three out of four people do not think the feedback they’re getting is helping them make meaningful change. Not only that, “research shows that it only improves performance one-third of the time, while actually making it worse one-third of the time”.

So clearly it’s time to rethink how you’re giving feedback! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Coaching, Executive Coaching, Life Coaching, Thoughtfully Fit, Training Tagged With: benefits of coaching, business coach approach, coach boss, coaching as a management style, executive coaching, leadership, thoughtful manager

March 19, 2019 By Darcy Luoma

Thoughtful Onboarding with Jill Mueller

by DLCC Coach Jill Mueller

Employee retention starts before the first day!

I have had nearly a dozen first days of work, and I can honestly say that I have never had a first day of work that I would classify as great, much less thoughtful.

On one of my first days, I surprised my boss by even showing up. HR told me to come, but my boss was expecting me the following week. I did a lot of reading that day. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Coach's Corner, Coaching, Executive Coaching, Thoughtfully Fit Tagged With: business coach approach, coach boss, coaching as a management style, executive coaching, leadership, thoughtful manager, thoughtfully fit

November 6, 2018 By Darcy Luoma

When the Peter Principle Affects Performance Reviews

Most people are promoted to the level of incompetence.

That may sound harsh, but I see it over and over again. As a matter of fact, it has a name. It’s called the Peter Principle.

Someone has strong technical expertise, and so they are promoted to manager. But they aren’t given the training to succeed in that role. So when performance review time comes around, they just check the boxes to try to get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible. They don’t know how to make the performance review meaningful for their direct reports in order to positively influence their behavior. So they go through the motions in giving the review, but don’t really know what they are doing, or how to maximize it for greatest impact.   [Read more…]

Filed Under: Coaching, Executive Coaching, Thoughtfully Fit Tagged With: effective reviews, peter principle, thoughtful manager, thoughtfully fit

October 16, 2018 By Darcy Luoma

Help Me Help You

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone in our lives gave us a how-to manual for themselves? The guide could tell us everything about what they like to do, how they work best, what some of their weaknesses are, and what behaviors set them off.

Just think about how much miscommunication could be avoided, not to mention the joy that would come from spending your life being treated just the way you want. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Coaching, Executive Coaching, Thoughtfully Fit Tagged With: learning styles, personal user's manual, thoughtful manager, thoughtfully fit

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