Resist reverse delegation (the "monkey back" problem)

When a report brings you their monkey, don’t take it — send it back with the next step owned.

Why it works

William Oncken and Donald Wass described "management time" being captured by reports who escalate responsibility back to the manager. When a manager accepts a task that was delegated, they model that upward escalation works and incentivize it. The manager becomes the bottleneck; the report becomes a supplicant. Resisting this requires a specific conversational move: returning the next action explicitly to the person who brought it.

How to do it

1. When someone says "we have a problem" and looks at you, ask "what’s your recommended next step?"
2. If they say "I don’t know," say "think about it and come back with an option by [time]" — don’t fill the gap yourself.
3. When you do take action on something delegated, call it out explicitly so it’s a deliberate exception, not a pattern.
4. After any meeting where you absorbed someone’s task, move it back to their name before the week is out.

Evidence

The "Who’s got the monkey?" HBR article (Oncken & Wass, 1974) is one of the most-reprinted Harvard Business Review pieces, suggesting wide practitioner resonance. The mechanism maps onto organizational research on escalation of commitment and managerial overload. (clinical)

The monkey metaphor is practitioner wisdom; controlled studies on reverse delegation as an isolated phenomenon are not available.

Sources

• Oncken & Wass (1974), Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?, Harvard Business Review
• Oncken, W., Jr., & Wass, D. L. (1974). Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? Harvard Business Review, 52(6), 75-80. (Reprinted 1999.)

Common mistake

Taking the task while saying "this is the last time" — which is precisely what incentivizes the behavior to continue, because it proved the strategy worked once.