Originally published on LinkedIn on 24 September 2026.
The Blind Spot Brief: Difficult Conversations Series
This series looks at the conversations most leaders know they should have, and don’t. This week: the workload conversation, telling someone on your team that a problem is genuinely theirs to solve, not yours to take back.
The blind spot
Someone stops by your office. “We’ve got a problem with this matter, can I get your thoughts?” You know it well, you have the context, and it’s faster to just deal with it than to explain the thinking behind a solution. So you say, “Leave it with me, I’ll take a look,” and the problem moves from their desk to yours.
That feels like being available, supportive, the kind of leader people can bring things to. What’s actually happened is a straightforward transfer. The problem, and the responsibility for solving it, has moved from the person paid to handle it to you, and it will keep moving that way every time the pattern repeats, until your own desk is full of other people’s problems and theirs is comparatively light.
Why this happens
A classic 1974 Harvard Business Review article, “Management Time: Who’s
Got the Monkey?” by William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass, gave this exact pattern a name that’s stuck for fifty years. They called the problem a monkey, and described how it jumps from a subordinate’s back to a manager’s the moment the manager says something like “let me think about it and get back to you.” At that instant, the manager has taken on the next move, and therefore the monkey, while the subordinate is free to wait.
The article became one of HBR’s two best-selling reprints ever for a reason, the pattern it describes is close to universal. It isn’t a failure of delegation skill. It’s a habit that feels responsible in the moment, taking something on feels like leadership, even as it quietly undoes the point of having a team capable of handling it.
What this actually costs
This shows up directly in utilisation and leverage ratio. Every hour spent solving a problem that belonged to someone else is an hour not spent on the higher value work only a partner can do, business development, oversight, the judgement calls that actually require the role. Meanwhile, the person whose problem it originally was doesn’t get the chance to build the judgement that comes from solving it themselves.
The firm ends up paying twice for the same capability, once for the team member who isn’t being stretched, and once for the partner’s time being spent below its actual value. Leverage ratio looks fine on the org chart. In practice, the leverage isn’t real, because the problems keep flowing upward instead of being handled at the level they were meant to be handled.
How to have it
The moment that matters most is the one where the problem first arrives. The instinct is to solve it, or to hold onto it while you think. Both keep the monkey on your desk.
• Ask what they think should happen, before offering your own view. “What have you considered so far?” keeps the next move with them, rather than handing it to you by default.
• Give the problem back with a specific next step. Not “let me think about it,” which takes the monkey, but “come back to me tomorrow with two options and a recommendation,” which keeps it with them while still offering your input.
• Notice the pattern, not just the moment. One instance of stepping in isn’t the issue. The habit is what’s worth watching, how often problems that should stay on someone else’s desk end up back on yours, week after week.
One question to ask this week
Look at what’s currently sitting on your own desk. Ask yourself plainly, how much of this is actually mine, and how much of it started as someone else’s problem that I quietly took on?
If more of it belongs to someone else than you expected, that’s worth sitting with.
The workload conversation is one of the most consistently avoided in professional services, and one of the most expensive when it doesn’t happen. If you want to know where operational blind spots are sitting in your own firm, and what they’re costing, you can start by completing the Blind Spot Self-Assessment. It’s free and is for firms size 25 – 250 people. Within 3 minutes you will have a clear idea on where your firm is exposed and what to do next.