Sloping shoulders and monkey collectors

Whilst building my accountancy practice, I’ve also built up a small portfolio of flats with a business partner.

If ever we have an empty property leading up to Christmas, I always joke that we will get a tenant in the New Year as couples often split up in January. Perhaps it’s all that talk of resolutions that causes people to make a big change in their lives! And if not as drastic as that, the gyms and weight-watchers classes are always full!

But change doesn’t always need to be as big as starting again or going on drastic fitness programmes!

Most changes are incremental. Imagine flying a helicopter and moving the control stick by one degree. Then 5 minutes later by another degree and 5 minutes later by another. These are small changes but do that for an hour and you will end up in a completely different place than the one you would have reached.

Even if your business has been going for decades, that doesn’t mean you can’t improve and there will be loads of areas which are not as effective as others.

Back in the dim and distant past, I had a really difficult manager who was always telling everyone how important she was and never admitting to making any mistakes even though they were obviously her fault. For the purposes of this email, we will call her Tina although that wasn’t her real name.

I also had a lady who did a variety of admin and financial jobs who we’ll call Shirley.

Shirley was one of the most conscientious people who ever worked for the firm. She eventually retired through ill-health many years after the normal retiring age.

Shirley rarely said anything bad about anyone so when she made a comment in a discussion about Tina having “sloping shoulders”, I asked her what she meant.

“Well” she explained, “everything that’s on her shoulders seems to slide right off them and across the desk to Jemima. Again, Jemima wasn’t her real name, but she was a very good junior member of staff who became a very good senior member of staff in the years that followed.

I made a point to keep an eye on the situation and observed over the next few weeks how little actual work Tina did. Even the things that she was qualified to do, and Jemima wasn’t, seemed to end up being done by Jemima.

The final straw was when some work that I’d given Tina was wrong and Tina blamed Jemima! That’s what people with sloping shoulders do.

Of course, the opposite of sloping shoulders are monkey collectors. This is covered in the book “The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey”.

In the book, the writer encourages the reader to think of each task that needs to be done as a monkey. And if you’ve got to do it, then you have a monkey on your back.

In your business, generally speaking the main monkey collectors are also great staff members.

As the business owner, you want your apprentices to become great monkey collectors. You want them to take every single monkey they can get. You want them to be hungry to learn new things.

What you don’t want is for them to be come barriers to growth.

The more monkeys someone has dealt with, the more experience they will have gained and the more valuable they will be as an employee. Until they get too many monkeys of course.

This happens when an inbox is full to bursting. When they don’t have enough time to even keep their “to do” list up to date. At that point, monkey collecting habits start to cause a few problems alongside the raft of solutions they usually provide.

Time to do something.

Getting the balance right between sloping shoulders and monkey collectors is a challenge in every business.

The long-term solution requires complete clarity on who is responsible for what. There are six stages to this:

1. Identify all the roles that exist within your organisation and document them in an index of roles
2. Identify which are primary roles i.e. must only be occupied by one person and which are multi roles
3. Allocate each of the Primary roles to a member of the team
4. Identify the members of staff who fill all the multi-roles
5. Work out which role reports to which other role starting with Managing Director and working outwards
6. Train them on those roles

What that 6-step process does is create total clarity.

That will reduce the risk of sloping shoulders and stop the conscientious monkey collectors from drowning in things that should be done by someone else.

Of course, those with sloping shoulders will immediately be thinking how to get round your big initiative.

One way to stop that happening is to put a pack together for each member of staff including all the roles they do. Then ask them to sign under each role page that they will undertake that role to the best of their ability. People with sloping shoulders hate this because they know it’s harder to wriggle off the hook.

When we did that at our accountancy firm, it was a fantastic exercise. Those who were happy that they understood the roles they had on their staff page, signed immediately. Those who had a few things on their roles that they’d never had proper training on, let us know which bits they needed help on, and we got it organised.

One person who was determined not to do their job and was a walking disaster magnet left.

Two or three of the sloping shoulder brigade, dragged their heels, came up with nonsensical excuses that evolved into some unambiguous conversations that needed to be had.

It was a good result all round.

Here’s a story, titled “Whose Job Is It, Anyway?” which illustrates the importance of getting people to understand the responsibilities of their roles.

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job.

Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have.

The story may be confusing, but the message is clear: no one took responsibility so nothing got accomplished.

It’s a story that plays out often in organizations and companies and in teams – anywhere there is a culture that lacks accountability.

Get the roles properly documented, allocated and trained and then the story of Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody won’t happen in your company. Shoulders won’t be quite so sloping and there’ll be less good members of staff collapsing under troops of monkeys.