I was once the area manager in charge of 14 branches of stores spread over a 50 mile radius. The company was introducing a new strategy to better serve customers and improve operations while keeping motivation high by creating personal support and peer-review mechanisms to improve individual productivity while boosting morale. The strategy needed a paradigm shift in employee thinking, plus a lot of new nuances to be mastered. Training had to be done for each individual employee, and it had to be coordinated.
Seeing as I had many other responsibilities, some associated with the change of strategy, I needed to delegate the training bit to someone competent. After scouting around, I landed on one of my subordinates. I had ready a brief of required results from the process, and we sat down to discuss it, agreeing on time-frames, as well as what a satisfactory result would look like.
The subordinate however requested me to conduct the first training session with her in attendance so she could get a proper grasp and refine her own ideas, to which I obliged. During follow-up appointments, she kept complaining of individual department stores’ managers’ lack of cooperation in giving her requisite time and support for the process, needing add my weight. She was also falling back on the time-line; at some point, she was so far behind that she requested me to take up training at a few stores so we could beat the deadline.
On hind-sight, I should have assessed the urgency of the training – as it turns out, we could have carried on the training for a longer period of time, allowing her time to negotiate with each store manager. When she was falling too far behind, we could have decided that during one of her trainings, she also gets a few other capable employees to learn like she learnt from me and help her with training the rest. These measures could have kept the monkey off my back.
References
Blanchard, K. & Johnson, S. (2004). The One Minute Manager. HarperCollins, 112pp.
Oncken W. & Wass, L.D. “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?”, in Harvard Business Review (Nov – Dec 1974); 75-80p.
