Big Rocks, Little Monkeys
I heard someone define a leader once as the person in the jungle who climbs the tallest tree, looks around, and says, "Wrong jungle. We need to go somewhere else." I think about that a lot, because most of us never climb the tree. We're too busy fighting whatever's in front of us.
That's the trap. Not laziness — busyness. There's a real difference between being productive and just being in motion.
Your bucket has room for one big rock
There's an old idea, sharpened for me recently by my friend Dan Rockwell, author of Leadership Freak: think of your week as a bucket. If you fill it with small stuff first — the emails, the calls, the little fires — your big rock never fits. It's not that the big rock got crowded out on purpose. It's that nobody protected space for it.
The big rock is the thing that actually moves your business forward. Vision work. A hard conversation you've been putting off. Your own development as a leader. None of it is urgent. All of it is important. And urgent will always win unless you decide, on purpose, that it doesn't get to.
Nobody is going to walk into your office and demand you do your long-range planning. Or develop yourself or your people. Instead, your team, your customers, your inbox — they all show up with something urgent. That doesn't make it important. It just makes it loud.
Watch out for the monkeys
Here's where Dan added something I hadn't fully connected before: every one of those urgent interruptions is often somebody else's problem, looking for a new owner. Ken Blanchard called it a monkey. Someone comes to you with an issue, and if you're not careful, you say "I'll take care of it" — and just like that, their monkey is now your monkey.
It kinda feels good in the moment, doesn’t it? You solved a problem. You're needed. But do that enough times and your office turns into a zoo, and you're the one carrying all those monkeys your team should be raising themselves.
The fix isn't complicated, but it takes discipline. When someone brings you a problem, don't hand them an answer. Ask: "What have you tried?" Then: "What would you like to try?" Let them do the thinking. If they genuinely don't know how, ask who they know who might. You're not being cold. You're training them to solve their own problems instead of training them to bring you their monkeys.
The two questions worth asking every week
What's my big rock this week — the one thing that actually moves us forward?
And whose monkey am I currently holding that was never mine to carry?
Answer those honestly, and you'll find a lot more room in your bucket than you thought you had.
If you're ready to get honest about your own big rocks — and figure out whose monkeys you're carrying that were never yours — let's talk. Book a free discovery call and we'll dig into it together.
