The Servant Leadership Upgrade
Oncken taught leaders to stop collecting monkeys. Servant leadership teaches leaders to stop creating conditions where monkeys are handed off in the first place.
Oncken’s Focus
Don’t take the monkey.
Teach employees to feed it.
Protect your time.
Avoid the zoo.
Servant Leadership’s Expansion
Build people who don’t need to give the monkey away.
Teach them to lead it, not just feed it.
Expand their capability, not just preserve your bandwidth.
Grow a community, not merely prevent chaos.
Oncken helps leaders survive. Servant leadership helps organizations flourish.
One keeps monkeys off your back. The other builds people who become leaders themselves.
If you’d like, I can revise the whole column for rhythm and cohesion now that the table is gone.
Here is the fully revised column with the bullet‑list version reinserted and the flow smoothed so the piece reads as one coherent essay.
When Your Employees Bring You Monkeys: Why Servant Leadership Goes Further Than Oncken Imagined
Bill Oncken’s famous “monkey” metaphor from The One Minute Manager has endured because it captures a universal leadership experience with almost comic accuracy. An employee walks into your office, explains a problem, and waits. If you say, “I’ll take care of that,” the monkey leaps from their back onto yours. Repeat this pattern across a team and suddenly you’re not leading people — you’re running a zoo.
Oncken’s advice is practical: teach employees to feed and care for their own monkeys. Don’t let them hand off ownership of their problems. Coach them to bring not just the issue, but a proposed solution. Empower them to act.
But servant leadership takes this idea several layers deeper. It doesn’t stop at “teach them to feed their monkeys.” It asks a more radical question:
Why do your employees believe the monkey belongs to you in the first place?
Layer 1: Ownership
Oncken focuses on operational ownership — who handles the task, who solves the problem, who carries the monkey. Servant leadership agrees, but adds a relational dimension: employees must feel safe enough, trusted enough, and valued enough to take ownership without fear of punishment for imperfect attempts.
A servant leader doesn’t just decline the monkey. They cultivate an environment where the employee never tries to hand it off.
Layer 2: Competence
Teaching someone to feed their monkey is a skill-transfer moment. Servant leadership expands this into a developmental commitment. The leader’s role is not merely to push the monkey back but to grow the person who carries it.
This means strengthening:
judgment
confidence
clarity of purpose
autonomy
The monkey becomes a vehicle for professional growth, not just a task to be delegated.
Layer 3: Agency
Oncken’s model assumes the leader is the natural “higher authority” to whom monkeys might be escalated. Servant leadership flips the hierarchy. The leader’s job is to remove barriers so the employee can act without escalation.
Instead of “Don’t give me your monkey,” the servant leader asks: “What do you need so you can handle this without me?”
This is empowerment at the structural level — not just behavioral coaching, but redesigning systems so employees have genuine agency.
Layer 4: Mutual Accountability
In Oncken’s zoo, the leader is overwhelmed because employees have learned that the boss will always take the monkey. Servant leadership creates a culture where accountability is shared, not shifted.
Employees own their monkeys. Leaders own the ecosystem in which those monkeys live.
The leader is accountable for:
clarity of expectations
access to resources
psychological safety
consistent feedback
removal of systemic obstacles
When these are present, monkey‑passing becomes unnecessary.
Layer 5: Purpose
Oncken’s metaphor is transactional: monkeys are problems, and problems must be managed. Servant leadership is transformational: monkeys are opportunities to align daily work with shared purpose.
A servant leader helps employees see:
why the monkey matters
how it connects to mission
how solving it strengthens the team
how it contributes to personal growth
Purpose turns monkey‑care from burden into contribution.
The Servant Leadership Upgrade
Oncken taught leaders to stop collecting monkeys. Servant leadership teaches leaders to stop creating conditions where monkeys are handed off in the first place.
Oncken’s Focus
Don’t take the monkey.
Teach employees to feed it.
Protect your time.
Avoid the zoo.
Servant Leadership’s Expansion
Build people who don’t need to give the monkey away.
Teach them to lead it, not just feed it.
Expand their capability, not just preserve your bandwidth.
Grow a community, not merely prevent chaos.
Oncken helps leaders survive. Servant leadership helps organizations flourish.
One keeps monkeys off your back.
The other builds people who become leaders themselves.
image and some content AI-generated
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Post inspired by the forthcoming book, Listening to Lead (Alanazi and Leaver)
For more posts on the topic of listening to lead, click HERE.
For more posts by and about Mowafiq Alanazi, click HERE.
For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.
Book Description:
Most leadership problems are not caused by poor strategy, weak vision, or lack of talent. They are caused by something far more basic: leaders who do not truly listen.
In L2L Listening to Lead: Demystifying the Dynamics of Power; What Weak Leaders Fear and Strong Leaders Cultivate, the authors--drawing on decades of leadership experience across governments, higher education, the private sector, and social impact organizations--reveal a powerful principle: organizations thrive when listeners listen in way that create genuine partnership.
Most leaders practice active listening, but active listening alone is not enough. What transforms organizations is interactive listening--a leadership practice that invites followers to become candid contributors and shared owners of problems, solutions, and innovation.
At the heart of this book is a powerful leadership tool called reverse evaluation, a structured method that allows leaders to learn from the people they lead. When used well, it rebuilds trust, energizes discouraged teams, and unlocks creativity that hierarchical leadership often suppresses.
Practical, experience-driven, and grounded in real leadership experience, Listening to Lead shows how organizations become not only more effective--but truly alive.
Keywords:
leadership; listening; organizational culture; employee engagement; stakeholder engagement; leader-follower partnership; servant leadership; reverse evaluation; bottom-up evaluation; empowerment; organizational health; inclusive leadership; interactive listening; active listening; navigating power dynamics; leader types; organizational development; organizational structure; functional alignment in an organization; change dynamics; transformational organizational change
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