Creating Initiative . . .
"Who’s got the Monkey?"

Synopsis

You start out your day with the best intentions, however, there are so many demands on your time. What can you do? To ignore many of those demands would be a great risk to the success of your company and your career. Yet, many managers and supervisors are typically running out of time while their employees are typically running out of work.

The solution, getting control over the timing and content of what you do. By creating initiative on the part of your employees, you will increase your managerial leverage and enable the value of each hour spent in management time to multiply. To fully understand where your time goes and where your leverage points are, you must understand the concepts of "Management Time" and "Vocational Time."

• "Vocational Time" is the time you spend doing things. The more time you spend personally doing things, the less time you have for seeing to it that other things are done.

• "Management Time" is the time you spend seeing to it that things are done. The more time you spend seeing to it that things are done, the less time you have for personally doing any of these things.

You cannot do both at once!

If you insist on doing both, you will wind up with an eighty-hour work week. A situation that can only exhaust you, create stress and drive you and those around you crazy! The manager or supervisor who is doing the work of two or more people cannot succeed in a manager or supervisor position. He or she does not have the time!

Each leader must acquire expertise in the art of delegation. Whenever next action steps (defined as "monkeys") occur from an interaction between managers and employees, expert managers know how to keep the monkey squarely on the shoulder of the employee. Their credo is as follows:

At no time will I ever take a monkey that belongs to you and let it reside with me. I will help you take care of the monkey by providing some feeding instructions, but I will not permit the monkey to leave you and stay with me!

This session will prepare managers to use the "leverage" of different types of delegation. This will enable them to maximize their own productivity as well as the productivity of others. It will also provide them with a systematic approach for the process of creating empowerment and ownership with employees that will stimulate the development of others. It will foster a work environment that is less stressful and frustrating for both manager and employee.

Using the learning objectives of this session, managers and supervisors will learn to create employee initiative in the workplace.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this module participants will understand:

• The difference between "Vocational Time" and "Management Time."
• The value of transferring initiative to the employee.
• The definition of a "monkey."
• The art of effective delegation . . . keeping "monkeys" in their rightful place.
• The 5 point Freedom Scale and assignment of insurance policies used in effective delegation.
• How effective delegation increases the development and sense of ownership of the employee.

Participants will be able to:

• Make more effective use of their managerial time.
• Utilize the 5 point Freedom Scale when assigning tasks and responsibilities.
• Apply the Rules for the Care and Feeding of a "monkey" population.