Zach Selch explains the "monkey on your back" problem: when salespeople hand routine tasks to their manager instead of handling them. He offers three fixes: hire someone to manage admin work, clarify that managers coach rather than do paperwork, and simplify systems so salespeople work independently.
Chapters
You know what it's like, sometimes you're just walking down the hallway and you see a subordinate and he has a monkey on his back and suddenly the monkey's on your back and you can't get the monkey off your back. What do you mean? What do I mean by the monkey on your back? Well, Harvard Business Review used this term almost 50 years ago to refer to a situation where one of your reports Sort of throws a job on you that you weren't scheduled to do, or you weren't planning to do. And very often, your subordinates come up to you, your reports, and they will pass over a problem that they have. They say, Zach, I have a problem. Can you help me with that problem? And you end up having to do it, even though really that wasn't what you planned. You had a whole day of work planned out, and suddenly you have a monkey on your back. What's the nature of your relationship with your subordinates? Some sales managers are little more than, say, the company secretary. If your reports see you as somebody whose job is basically to be the team secretary, somebody who takes attendance, that kind of thing, this is what's going to happen. They're going to throw jobs on you. What you should be doing as a sales manager is providing strategic guidance. Okay, you should be providing strategic guidance, you should be providing mentoring, you should be providing coaching. Another problem that very often we have is simply you're putting in place different activities, different things that they have to do that simply Typically the systems are too complicated for them to do it. I always like to have what I call an anchor. That's a person who's designated to do these little administrative things that need to be done in the office that your people shouldn't be doing, but there's nobody else to do except for you. So if you have a designated anchor, that's somebody who's always in the office, a secretary or somebody like that, who's responsible for providing service to your team, then those things get done. If you make the systems easy for your people to do, very often we put in place very difficult systems that are all really impossible or very difficult for field sales staff to do, and then they come to you and they say, can you get this signed for me? Can you walk this around the office? Those type of things. Okay, so how do you avoid the monkey? Have an anchor, clarify your relationship, and make systems easy for your team to handle themselves. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help.
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