S01E05 The Keep Your Monkeys Episode

Vincent starts off with a story….

Big Ideas:

• Don’t take employees monkeys, or it turns into a zoo
• Employees need to keep their own monkeys
• Leaders and managers are not necessarily the same
• It’s exhausting and unsustainable for a manager to take everyone’s monkeys
• It’s natural for managers to take things off people’s plates. They think it’s their job. 
• How are we supporting people’s transition from individual contributor to management? 
• What is the role of a manager? 
• The shift from owning your work, to overseeing the work of the individual contributors work, without taking it on
• Role of the manager is to make obstacles go away (organization, finances, resources, team dynamics, psychological safety, recruiting, etc)
• Manager to focus on the conditions - preparing the space by removing obstacles, and putting things in
• Creating the conditions for competencies to be built
• Should we let employees fail?
• The relationship between failure and trust.
• Creating the culture and context for failure is important
• Not taking on the failures of individual contributors as our own failures - accountability infection
• Fail fast, fail early, fail often
• People are already failing. Are they doing something with it? 
• As leaders, help them through the failure.
• The emotional response to the words we use, including fail
• How are leaders talking about failure?
• Naming emotions and experiences so that we can have power over it
• Looking at our fail points ahead of time, so we can pivot sooner
• How we keep persisting on to avoid failure even when it’s the wrong path
• Looking at our fail points allows us to know whether the risk is worth it
• Doing more of the same strategy doesn’t work if it’s the wrong strategy
• Test, Assess, Act
• Agile working, sprints, and retrospectives
• Using the scientific method and testing hypotheses
• What have I done? What will I do? What are my obstacles?
• Agile working - product management and scrum master

References:

• The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey by Ken Blanchard
• The Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan
• Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown
• Taking Smart Risks by Doug Sundheim
• Trust Matters by Ken Blanchard

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