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Who's Got the Monkey? How Healthy Boundaries and Responsibility Help You Help Yourself

June 2022 · Erin Randall

Note: In August 2022, I gave a live version of this talk to The Future of Work Scotland, hosted by Sathpal Singh and Donald Henderson. You can watch this interactive presentation, which was really a conversation amongst myself and the attendees, here.

One of my favorite articles ever published is the Harvard Business Review classic "Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?" by William Onken, Jr. and Donald Wass. It's clear, it's pithy, and it's visual. Readers see the monkey move from one person to another. I've shared this article with organizations, teams, and clients for years. And once they read it, they understand my question of, "So, where's the monkey?" and they can laugh along with me. Huzzah!

A couple of months ago, I shared this same monkey article with an old friend, thinking that they would not only find it humorous, but they might appreciate the underlying message as much as I do. I was right, they loved it! My friend then used the article as an impetus for a conversation with their organization about outside work entering their system, about communication and boundaries that helped their organization to see its monkeys and to begin making changes.

Before you continue with this post, go read "Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?" I'll wait right here until you finish. What I write about here will make so much more sense with the appropriate simian foundation.

So, who's got the monkey?

Why This Is a Leadership Problem

Here's what I love about Onken and Wass's original article: it wasn't written for individual contributors trying to protect their to-do lists. It was written for managers, the people whose calendars fill up with everyone else's monkeys until there's no room left for the work only they can do. More than fifty years later, that problem hasn't gone away. If anything, it's gotten worse, and the research backs that up.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that only 19% of managers report having strong delegation skills, and 71% say their stress has climbed significantly since stepping into a leadership role. Forty percent have considered leaving their leadership roles altogether just to protect their wellbeing (DDI, 2025). That's not a coincidence. That's a direct line from "I keep every monkey that comes my way" to burnout and attrition at the top of the org chart.

Gallup's most recent workplace research tells a similar story. Manager engagement has been falling faster than engagement for any other group of employees, and because managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in their team's engagement, an overloaded, disengaged manager doesn't suffer alone. Their whole team feels it (Gallup, 2025).

And in a September/October 2025 Harvard Business Review piece, MIT Sloan's Elsbeth Johnson dug into why leaders keep struggling to let go, even when they know better. She points to a few very human reasons: completing a task gives us a small hit of satisfaction that delegating does not, redirecting someone who wants help feels unkind in the moment, and many leaders never fully unlearn the habits that made them great individual contributors in the first place (Johnson, HBR, 2025). None of that makes a leader weak. It makes them human. But it does mean the monkeys keep climbing aboard unless we're deliberate about putting them elsewhere.

This is where it gets personal for leaders specifically. When an individual contributor picks up a monkey that isn't theirs, one project slips. When a leader does it, the whole team loses their compass. Their people stop practicing judgment because the leader keeps making the call. The leader's own strategic work, the thinking only they're positioned to do, gets pushed to the margins of the day. And slowly, the org starts running on the leader's bandwidth instead of the team's collective capacity.

Follow the Monkey

Consider the following:

  • How much of the work you or your system is doing is "hidden?"
  • What percentage of work is not actually valuable, important?
  • How much work are you doing that really belongs elsewhere?

Let me start with an example.

Several years ago, I responded to a message from a coworker wanting to talk about agile metrics and implementation for their current project. I called the person (because we value people over processes!), and we talked for 10-15 minutes. We covered what they were hoping to measure and why, as well as where other programs in the organization were doing similar efforts.

At the end of the call, the person said, "So, you're going to research this some more and get back to me?"

And that is when I saw the monkey, arms out, ready to leap to me. (And I swear, that monkey was smiling at me as it prepared to jump onto my back.)

"No," I said. "This issue belongs to you. I've provided some links and books for suggested reading, and I'm happy to talk to you in the future about this regarding questions you have from that reference material, but the continued research and final decision on what to do stays with you."

The person was a bit taken aback by my response. I imagine that they were thinking that I'd be happy to do the deeper digging and report back. After all, I was the coach, right, and I was supposed to be helpful?

What would have happened if I'd said, "Sure, let me work on this and get back to you"?

  • Grinding to a halt. In putting aside my own work, I would have impeded forward momentum on work deemed valuable by my director, my team, and my system. Yes, the research monkey had value, but that value was primarily to someone else.
  • Scapegoat. If I had picked up this monkey, I was essentially making myself someone else's scapegoat, an excuse as to why work wasn't moving forward. In daily scrum, the person had the "Oh, that is being researched," but no real accountability.
  • Reference silo. I'd have solidified some knowledge for myself, the person on the other end of the phone would have learned to use me as an Agile reference library that could solve problems for them, and they would continue to either get work done or not done. They would have learned little other than to ask me for what they needed.
  • Helpful versus useful. This is a common trap for coaches, and honestly, for leaders too: we're supposed to help, and the easiest way to be helpful is by giving advice, telling people what to do, getting them to a different state. But let's flip this. As coaches and as leaders, we are not there to be helpful, we are there to be useful. If we are always "helping" systems and teams and the people we lead by picking up their monkeys, then we are reinforcing Karpman's drama triangle.

Think what you might, but my refusal to adopt their monkey was a difficult moment for me. Being helpful, being of service, saying "yes" to requests that come to me, that is hardwired into my way of being and working. It's an opportunity for me to connect with others, to share the knowledge I've worked hard to build. By not adopting a monkey, I honored my boundaries and remained focused on my own initiatives.

If you return to those questions I asked at the beginning of this section, you can suddenly see how monkeys in the wrong section of the zoo can derail a system's progress towards its outcomes. When you adopt a monkey, you jeopardize the results that your system must achieve. And if you're the leader, you jeopardize something else too: your team's growth. Every monkey you keep is a decision someone else didn't get to practice making.

Walking the Line, or Understanding Boundaries

What do monkeys have to do with boundaries? So much, as it turns out, and now is an excellent time to identify what boundaries are and what boundaries are not. Plainly put, boundaries are the limits we set with other people that indicate what we find acceptable and unacceptable in their behavior towards us. As Henry Cloud says, "Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership. Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me a sense of freedom." My own father says, so very wisely, I might add, "You get what you tolerate."

Boundaries are respectful, clear, and consistent.

Boundaries are not punitive, hesitant, occasional.

When you have porous, weak boundaries, you are often held hostage to everyone else's needs but seldom your own. Your own work, and by extension your team's work or your organization's work, takes a back seat because you're so busy fixing and attending to others' issues. This problem snowballs. As you cede control over what you do and how you spend your time, you lose control. Because others know that your boundaries are weak or non-existent, they will often expect you to be on call for their needs, without regard for the impact on you or your work systems. Once you've lost control, it's difficult to get it back. Suddenly, that monkey just became a gorilla. If you think monkeys are difficult to control, wait until you try a gorilla. "No one will listen to us unless we first listen to ourselves," says Marianne Williamson. You are your first responsibility.

For leaders, weak boundaries have a multiplier effect. Researchers studying what's now called "reverse delegation," the pattern where tasks quietly flow back up from a team to its leader, have found this dynamic playing out well beyond agile teams, including in academic departments, where administrators and faculty leaders end up absorbing work that was never theirs to carry (The Scholarly Kitchen, 2025). It happens gradually, one favor at a time, until a leader's calendar belongs to everyone but them.

Don't Forget Responsibility!

When I first began to think and to write about monkeys and boundaries, it was inevitable that I also think about how communication plays in, namely DISC profiles. I was specifically looking at individuals that fall within the "I" quadrant, the Influencers. But then I backtracked, as DISC assessments felt very broad and not quite the right fit for how my thinking on this topic was evolving. Christopher Avery's Responsibility Process, however, now we're talking!

Avery popularized his responsibility process as a behavioral-science framework that helps people see how their own responsibility works to do one of the following: to keep them stuck where they are or to move them forward. Here are four of the common blocks to standing in responsibility.

  • Blame. When in blame, we hold others at fault for causing something that affects us. If I was angry with that coworker because I spent time researching their issue instead of focusing on my own work, then I would be blaming them for getting me to pick up their monkey. I gave my power away, and this would not be a responsible act by me.
  • Justify. In justification, I use excuses for things being the way they are. How often have you heard, "Oh, that's just how we do things around here. No use trying to change that." Excuses remove the responsibility from behavior, justifying that lack of ownership. External forces, something out there, someone else, must change before I change. In justification, I've removed myself from responsibility.
  • Shame. "But don't you want to help me? A thoughtful, conscientious, nice colleague would help me with this." Shame is a powerful motivator, or demotivator, for that matter. Blaming one's self, which can be felt as guilt, could weigh me down. Or, I can remove myself from shame and refuse to pick up that monkey.
  • Obligation. Have you ever heard someone say, "I don't have a choice in this. I'm powerless. I'm only doing what I am obligated to do"? Yes, sometimes we do work that we are not enthusiastic about or sometimes don't want to do, but we can choose our mindset and how we approach that work. Responsibility is a choice, not an obligation.

So, going back to my colleague and the agile research monkey, how did I create, choose, or attract this monkey?

And with this question, I'm suddenly standing in responsibility. I have the power and the ability to find and solve the real problem. I can determine what it is that I really want from a situation or how to move forward and do what is next. If coworkers keep giving me their monkeys, then what am I doing to create that situation? What do I need to change so that I am not weighed down by work that does not belong to me? In responsibility, I'm clear about what I want and the direction in which I am going.

Leaders, this question is worth sitting with. If your team keeps handing you their monkeys, what are you doing, even unintentionally, to invite that? Elsbeth Johnson's HBR research points to one common answer: many leaders were promoted because they were excellent doers, and doing still feels more rewarding, and safer, than the slower work of coaching someone else through a decision (Johnson, HBR, 2025). Naming that pull is the first step to interrupting it.

It's All About the Options

By now, you're likely beginning to see how monkeys, boundaries, and responsibility all work together. Add in psychological safety, feedback, and communication, and powerful, clean questions, and a clearer picture begins to take shape. Communicating boundaries and practicing responsibility takes deliberate practice, and lots of it. So, if you're looking to practice holding your own boundaries, responsibly, and not adopting any monkeys, try these things (leaders, this list is especially for you):

  • Own your decision. Ask yourself, "Where am I free, powerful, and at choice," and then decide what your next step is. Own that decision. If I had accepted the agile-metric monkey that a coworker was trying to pass to me, I was not at choice, I was at my colleague's choice. They may have thought that their dilemma was more important than my other initiatives, but neither I nor the system I served would have agreed.
  • Be a mentor. Yes, mentoring, that pay-it-forward act where you plant trees under which you will not enjoy the shade. Mentors can model what having and holding appropriate boundaries looks like, and mentees can ask for feedback about how you are setting your own boundaries. (Do you like how I worked in some practicing about giving and receiving feedback here, too?)
  • Don't fix the problem for someone else. If a coworker or colleague doesn't know how to do something, don't take over their work and deliver a completed product for them. Instead, ask them to put a specific amount of time on your calendar. You can work together, analyzing the issue, transferring knowledge, building connection. You're not fixing the problem for them, you're fixing the problem with them. Best of all, they are a giant step closer to being a self-sufficient expert.
  • Set regular office hours. If you are a specialist, the go-to expert on a particular tool, consider setting regular office hours where people with questions on that topic can book time to work through a particular issue. You're still responsive to colleagues and sharing your knowledge, but your generosity is on your terms.

Build delegation into how you lead, not just what you reach for when you're overloaded. The leaders in DDI's research who delegate well don't treat it as a last resort. They treat it as a core leadership skill, one they practice on purpose, the same way they'd practice a hard conversation (DDI, 2025). If delegation only shows up when you're drowning, it will always feel like a loss instead of a strategy.

What do I have against monkeys?

Nothing, not a darn thing. In fact, I am pro-monkey, you might say, as long as that is my monkey. But as I have lots of monkeys, some might even say an entire primate habitat at a zoo, I need to be mindful and clear about what I'm doing and why. I must care and care responsibly for my own monkeys, and that means healthy, respectful boundaries in all systems. I want this not only for me, but for every person, every system, and especially for the leaders who set the tone for everyone watching them.

Let's return to the question I asked at the beginning of this post: Who's got the monkey?

Because that is just it, that is the question that you must ask yourself every time you raise your hand or add new work to your system. The simple act of asking, "Who's got the monkey?" provides clarity and awareness. When you ask the question, you see the monkey. And if you're leading a team, asking it out loud, in front of them, teaches everyone else to ask it too.

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