“Hey, we've got a problem”
Tuesday, 9:40 a.m. · Monterrey, N.L.
Rogelio, CEO of a metal furniture manufacturer in Monterrey with 85 employees, is walking to the conference room. In the hallway, Paty, the purchasing manager, catches up with him.
—Hey, Rogelio, we've got a problem with the sheet-metal supplier. He raised the price and says he won't deliver until we pay what's overdue.
Rogelio knows the supplier, knows the issue and wants to help. But he's late for his meeting. So he says the line we've all said at some point:
—Let me look into it and I'll get back to you.
Paty goes back to her desk, relieved. Rogelio walks into his meeting with something new on his back.
Just another Tuesday: four new monkeys on the CEO's back.
On Saturday morning, Rogelio is at the office answering overdue emails. Through the window he sees the empty parking lot. His team is at a cookout or getting ready to watch Rayados. And he thinks what almost every leader of a growing company thinks: “If I don't do it, nobody does.”
What Rogelio doesn't see is that his team isn't slacking off: it's waiting for him. Paty can't move forward with the supplier until he decides. Beto can't fill the order. Lalo can't close the deal. Rogelio thinks he's carrying the company. In reality, the company is lined up behind him.
The article: a monkey that changes backs
In November 1974, William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass published in Harvard Business Review an article with a title nobody forgets: “Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?” In 1999, the magazine republished it as one of its classics, with a commentary by Stephen R. Covey, and it has remained among its most-read pieces ever since.
The idea
A monkey is the next step in a matter.
It's not the whole problem: it's the next action someone has to take for the matter to move forward.
When Paty tells Rogelio “we've got a problem”, the monkey is on both their backs: one leg on each. When Rogelio answers “let me look into it and I'll get back to you”, the monkey finishes jumping onto his back. Why? Because now the next step is his. Paty has nothing left to do; she just has to wait… and, in a few days, ask: “How's the supplier thing going?”.
At that moment, the roles are reversed. Paty supervises Rogelio. She follows up on her boss.
Multiply that scene by every employee, every day, and you understand why leaders reach Friday exhausted while their team waits for instructions.
Three kinds of time
Oncken and Wass divide a manager's time into three:
| Kind of time | Who imposes it | What happens if you don't attend to it |
|---|---|---|
| Boss-imposed (or the board, or the owner) | Whoever is above you | There's a direct, quick consequence |
| System-imposed | Customers, suppliers, authorities, other areas | There's a consequence, though not always immediate |
| Self-imposed | You | It's the only time you can use to think, plan and grow the company |
The problem is that self-imposed time has a silent thief: the time your own team imposes on you every time you accept a monkey that isn't yours. That time comes out of the only space you had to lead. And the result is what we see in so many companies: extremely busy leaders doing other people's work, with no time for the work only they can do.
Five degrees of initiative
The most useful part of the article, and the least quoted, is a scale. Oncken and Wass propose that, faced with any matter, an employee can act with five degrees of initiative. From lowest to highest:
The authors are very clear: the first two degrees shouldn't exist in a healthy company. At degree 1 the employee controls neither their time nor their work. At degree 2, every question is a monkey that jumps upward.
The leader's goal isn't to solve things faster. It's to move each person, on each kind of matter, toward degrees 3, 4 and 5.
Expedition noteOn a roped mountain team, nobody asks the guide whether they can drink water or adjust their gloves. There are clear rules about what each person decides and what gets consulted. The guide keeps what only he can decide: the route, the weather, whether to climb or turn back. That's why the team moves forward.
Five rules for managing monkeys
To keep each monkey with its owner, the article proposes five rules. We translate them to the reality of a company in Monterrey:
No matter can stay alive without an owner and a next step. Either someone handles it with a date, or you consciously decide it's not worth it and close it. Forgotten monkeys cost the most: they come back, always at the worst moment.
The number of matters the leader carries personally must fit in their real schedule. If they don't fit, someone is waiting without knowing it.
No solving things in the hallway, the elevator or the parking lot. Those encounters are exactly where monkeys jump without anyone noticing.
Written in 1974 with memos in mind; today it applies to WhatsApp and email. When you tell an employee “send it to me by email”, the next step — reading it — is yours.
Before saying goodbye, both agree on who takes the next step, by when and with how much freedom (“recommend an option to me on Thursday” is degree 3; “solve it and let me know” is degree 4).
Fifty years later, does it still happen?
Yes. And with more tools for the monkey to jump. In 1974 an employee had to walk to the hallway to hand a monkey to the boss. Today they do it from their phone, at any hour, in a WhatsApp group with 14 other people.
interruptions a day: one every 2 minutes.
Microsoft, 2025of managers are engaged (it was 30% a year earlier).
Gallup, 2025more revenue for CEOs with high delegator talent.
Gallup, 2015Interruptions have multiplied. A Microsoft study (2025) of usage data from its tools found that the average worker is interrupted every two minutes during the workday, some 275 times a day between meetings, emails and messages. They receive on average 117 emails and 153 chat messages a day, and meetings after 8 p.m. grew 16 % in a year.
Middle managers are the first to burn out. Gallup (2025), in its global report on the state of the workplace, found that manager engagement fell from 30 % a 27 % in a single year, while that of individual contributors held at 18%. And fewer than half of managers (44 %) have received formal training in leading people. Nobody taught them not to pick up monkeys.
Delegating isn't a matter of style: it's growth. Gallup studied 143 CEOs of fast-growing companies in the United States (Badal and Ott, 2015). Those with high delegator talent generated 33% more revenue and achieved a three-year growth rate 112 percentage points higher than those who didn't delegate. Only 1 in 4 entrepreneurs had that talent naturally. The other three have to build it with method.
Manager engagement worldwide
Source: Gallup (2025), State of the Global Workplace.
And in Mexico the clock is getting shorter. With the reform to the Federal Labor Law published in the Official Gazette (Diario Oficial de la Federación) on May 1, 2026, the workweek goes from 48 to 46 hours starting January 1, 2027, and will drop to 40 by 2030. A leader who loses a third of the week carrying other people's monkeys won't have anywhere to find time.
Artificial intelligence throws monkeys too
There's a new monkey Oncken and Wass didn't imagine: work done with artificial intelligence that looks finished and isn't. A study published in Harvard Business Review (Niederhoffer et al., 2025) named it workslop (filler work): 4 in 10 workers had received it in the last month, and each case cost on average almost two hours of rework.
It's the same monkey in another costume: the employee hands in a 20-page report generated in five minutes, and the next step — reviewing it, correcting it and deciding — lands in the boss's backpack. AI doesn't eliminate monkeys on its own: if the process has no rules, it reproduces them faster.
How much the backpack weighs: Rogelio's case
Illustrative case, built from frequent patterns in companies with 20 to 200 employees in Nuevo León. Fictional names.
When we did the exercise with Rogelio's team, for two weeks we logged every matter that reached his desk, his phone or his hallway waiting for a decision from him.
Rogelio's backpack Illustrative case
Before 18 monkeys a day · ~18 h a week
After 90 days 5 monkeys a day · ~5 h a week
Percentage = weight of the monkeys in a 46-hour workweek. 13 hours recovered per week.
| Indicator | Before | After 90 days |
|---|---|---|
| Monkeys reaching Rogelio per day | 18 | 5 |
| Average time per monkey (listen, think, reply) | 12 min | 12 min |
| Hours per week carrying monkeys | ~18 h | ~5 h |
| Percentage of a 46-hour workweek | 39 % | 11 % |
| Average days a matter waits for the CEO's decision | 1.8 days | 0.4 days |
| Saturdays at the office per month | 3 | 0 |
Where did the 13 daily monkeys that stopped arriving come from?
- 6 were status questions (“has it arrived?”, “how much do they owe?”, “has it been invoiced?”). They were solved with a dashboard visible to everyone and an assistant that answers with data from the system.
- 4 were small-amount approvals (minor purchases, discounts within margin, planned overtime). They were solved with an approval matrix: up to a certain amount the manager decides, at degree 4 or 5.
- 3 were problems without a proposal. They still arrive, but now they arrive at degree 3: with two options and a recommendation. Rogelio decides in 3 minutes instead of investigating for 30.
The 5 monkeys that remain are the ones that belong to him: strategic customers, investment decisions, conflicts between areas. He recovered 13 hours a week. That's almost two full days to lead the company instead of operating it.
12 tactics to hand each monkey back to its owner
These are the ones that work best in growing companies. None requires a huge project; all require consistency.
In the conversation
Swap “let me look into it” for “what do you propose?”
It's the phrase that hands back the most monkeys. It isn't dodging: it's inviting people to think. If the person has no proposal, agree on when they'll bring one.
A problem with two options
Make it a team rule that nobody brings up a problem without at least two alternatives and a recommendation. In a month, the quality of the proposals changes.
Always ask: “what's the next step and who takes it?”
Before ending any conversation, confirm out loud whose monkey it is. If the answer is “you”, ask yourself whether it really is yours.
Name the degree of initiative
“This is level 4: solve it and let me know today.” When the team knows the scale, they know exactly how much freedom they have, and they stop asking out of fear of getting it wrong.
In the calendar
Ban hallway monkeys
If someone approaches you in the hallway or the parking lot, the answer is: “Bring it to our Thursday review with your proposal.” Kind, firm and with no exceptions.
One monkey review a week
Thirty minutes per person or per area, with a fixed agenda: which matters moved forward, which are stuck, what needs a decision. What can wait until Thursday waits until Thursday.
Closed-door blocks
Two 90-minute blocks a week without interruptions, protected as if they were meetings with your best customer. It's your self-imposed time; if you don't defend it, someone will take it.
In the process
Take a monkey inventory for two weeks
Log every matter that reaches you waiting for a decision: who brings it, what kind it is and how long it takes you. It's the cheapest diagnostic there is, and it almost always surprises.
Build an approval matrix
Who decides what, up to what amount and under what conditions: purchases, discounts, returns, overtime, customer credit. What's written down no longer needs to be asked.
Make status visible on its own
If you get asked “how are we doing?” more than three times a week about the same thing, it's not a communication problem: it's a visibility problem. A dashboard with a traffic light eliminates those monkeys at the root.
With artificial intelligence
An assistant that answers status questions
Connected to the company's information, it answers on WhatsApp or internal chat what people ask the CEO today: whether the material arrived, how much a customer owes, what stage an order is at. The monkey never reaches your backpack.
AI prepares, the person proposes, the leader decides
Use AI so the employee arrives better prepared: a summary of the case, the options compared, the estimated impact. But with one rule: the employee reviews and signs their proposal. That way AI raises the team's degree of initiative instead of throwing more filler work at you.
Delegating isn't letting go: it's designing
There's a common misunderstanding. Many leaders don't delegate because the times they tried, it went wrong: the employee decided something they shouldn't have, or didn't decide anything. And they conclude that “people aren't ready”.
But it's rarely a people problem. It's a design problem. Nobody told the employee how far they could decide, with what information and under what rules. Without that, the most sensible thing for them is to ask. Every question is a monkey. And the leader, who doesn't want anything to go wrong, takes it.
Stephen R. Covey, in his commentary on the 1999 edition, summed it up in one idea: a manager can't grant autonomy without first building the trust and the conditions for the employee to use it well. Delegating is designing a system where the right decision is the easiest one to make.
It's the same on the mountain. The guide doesn't tell each member of the team “do whatever you want”. He gives them the route, the rules, the gear and the checkpoints. And then, yes, everyone carries their own backpack.
How KLIMMER helps you put the monkeys down
At KLIMMER we work on this problem on the three fronts of the route: Processes, Technology and Operational AI. We're not going to give you a motivational talk about delegating. We're going to change the way decisions flow in your company.
Who decides what
- Monkey inventory: how many matters reach the CEO and middle managers, of what kind and how much time they consume.
- Decision and approval matrix by area, with amounts, conditions and degree of initiative.
- Leadership rhythm: short weekly reviews, a fixed agenda and clear rules so no monkey is left without an owner or a date.
Make information visible on its own
- Dashboards with traffic lights for sales, purchasing, collections and production, so nobody has to ask “how are we doing?”.
- Analysis of what information already exists in your current system and what's missing for each person to decide without escalating.
Keep the monkeys from arriving
- Assistants that answer status questions with the company's real data.
- Flows that sort the requests that come in today through WhatsApp and email, and send them to the right owner with complete information.
- AI templates so the team prepares degree-3 proposals, reviewed and signed by whoever presents them.
Where to start? With the Klimmer | Compass, at no cost: we identify where monkeys are piling up in your company and give you Your True North. If you want to go deeper, the Express Diagnostic measures your real backpack and gives you a 90-day roadmap to hand each monkey back to its owner.
How many monkeys are you carrying today?
Message us on WhatsApp and let's start by counting them. We'll tell you which are yours and which aren't.
The question for this week
Next Monday, before answering any message, try a simple test. Every time someone brings you a matter, before you answer, ask yourself silently:
“When this conversation ends, who will have the next step?”
If the answer is you, and it doesn't have to be, you've just found a monkey.
The summit isn't reached by carrying everyone's backpack. It's reached when each person carries their own, and the guide has free hands to see the path.
References
Badal, S. B. and Ott, B. (2015, April 14). Delegating: A huge management challenge for entrepreneurs. Gallup Business Journal. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182414/delegating-huge-management-challenge-entrepreneurs.aspx
Gallup. (2025). State of the global workplace: 2025 report. Gallup.
Microsoft. (2025, June). Breaking down the infinite workday [Work Trend Index special report]. Microsoft WorkLab.
Niederhoffer, K., Rosen Kellerman, G., Lee, A., Liebscher, A., Rapuano, K. and Hancock, J. T. (2025, September 22). AI-generated "workslop" is destroying productivity. Harvard Business Review.
Oncken, W., Jr. and Wass, D. L. (1974). Management time: Who's got the monkey? Harvard Business Review, 52(6), 75–80. Republished as a Harvard Business Review classic in 1999 (77(6), 178–186), with a commentary by Stephen R. Covey.
Secretaría de Gobernación. (2026, May 1). Decreto por el que se reforman diversas disposiciones de la Ley Federal del Trabajo, en materia de reducción de la jornada laboral. Diario Oficial de la Federación.
