Accountability in Schools is Harder Than It Looks
The basic premise of Shifting The Monkey: The Art Of Protecting Good People From Liars, Criers And Other Slackers by Ken Blanchard and Robert Piedmont is straightforward on paper. Every problem has an owner. When someone comes to you with a problem, there is a risk that instead of them going off and solving it, you end up carrying the problem yourself. That problem is the monkey. The goal is to make sure that when you leave a conversation with someone, the monkey stays on their back, not yours. In a school setting, this translates into a daily struggle between administrators and a particular breed of employee. You have the genuinely stuck teacher who needs resources, the manipulative teacher who wants sympathy and action plans from you, and the passive-aggressive teacher who will sit across from you for thirty minutes detailing every obstacle without ever proposing a solution. Blanchard and Piedmont's framework tries to give you the tools to tell the difference and handle each one without absorbing their responsibilities.
The Core Mechanic: Where Does The Monkey Live?
The technical part of the method is simpler than most people make it. During any management conversation, the monkey is defined as the next physical action that needs to happen. If you agree to write the improvement plan, the monkey is on your back. If the employee agrees to draft it and send it to you by Friday, the monkey stays on theirs. That is the entire mechanism. It is almost too simple, which is probably why most people fail at it. I spent three years working as an assistant principal in a medium-sized public high school before moving into a district-level role. The shift from building-level to district-level made me realize how much time I had been wasting on other people's monkeys without even noticing it. The specific edge case that changed how I operate involved a teacher who had developed what I would now call reflexive avoidance. She would show up to our weekly check-ins with five pages of context, three photos of broken equipment, and a detailed timeline of every person who had failed her department, but zero concrete next steps. She was not lying. She was not being difficult. She genuinely believed that if she provided enough data, I would solve it for her. My workaround was blunt and uncomfortable to implement. I stopped allowing her to bring written documents to our meetings. She could bring one typed page with exactly three proposed solutions and a deadline for each. If she showed up with more, we spent the meeting reviewing whether her constraints were actual barriers or invented ones. It took six weeks before she started bringing viable proposals instead of problems. The friction was real, but the alternative was me spending fourteen hours a week writing plans for a grown adult to execute.
Why The Framework Breaks Down In Practice
The book treats all monkeys the same. In reality, not every responsibility shift is a symptom of manipulation or laziness. Sometimes a teacher genuinely lacks the skills to move forward, and the monkey transfers temporarily because you are training them. The framework does not account well for the difference between a monkey that should never leave someone's back and one that needs to ride on your back for a week while you model the behavior. Blanchard and Piedmont touch on this distinction but they lean so heavily toward protecting high performers that the nuance gets muddy. Another thing the book glosses over is the emotional labor cost of enforcing this strictly. A teacher who feels caught with the monkey will sometimes escalate quickly. They will go to the parent group chat, they will CC the superintendent, they will start documenting everything you have ever said to them. I have watched two competent principals back down from accountability conversations because the teacher made the social cost of holding the line higher than the cost of just doing the work themselves. This is not a failure of the method. It is a failure of institutional support structures around the person using it.
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Counter-Intuitive Reality: Sometimes You Have To Take The Monkey
There is a scenario that most people miss. When a high performer consistently ends up with other people's monkeys, the system is already broken, and the solution is not more accountability discipline from you. It is structural intervention. If three different teachers are dumping their work on your best department head, keeping the monkey on everyone else's back just lets the dysfunction continue. The monkey belongs to the system, not the individual. In those cases, taking the monkey temporarily and then addressing the pattern is the right move, even though the book frames it as a loss. Similarly, you cannot apply this framework uniformly across all staff categories. Substitute teachers, paraprofessionals, and support staff often operate in roles where ambiguity is baked into the job description. The monkey shifts to them because the position was designed that way. Forcing accountability in those contexts just creates turnover. You have to identify which role structures are producing the problem before you start policing who carries what.
Applying This To Teacher Performance Reviews
The book is not specifically about evaluation systems, but the monkey concept maps directly onto how performance reviews get distorted. A teacher who has been slacking for six months will often arrive at evaluation season with a desperate, well-researched narrative about why their numbers look bad. External factors, budget cuts, difficult student populations, lack of cooperation from other departments. All of it true. None of it their responsibility to fix. The disciplined approach is to ask for evidence before accepting any of those claims as mitigation. If a teacher says their scores dropped because of a textbook change, you request documentation of that change and its impact timeline. If they cannot produce it, the monkey stays with them. This is tedious. It requires actual administrative competence. But it prevents the common failure mode where the loudest or most emotionally persuasive teacher gets the most favorable evaluation. I encountered a specific case where a veteran teacher had been coasting for eight years. She had mastered the art of the credible explanation. Every year she produced a stack of printed emails from parents complaining about scheduling conflicts, copies of old department meeting notes showing that promised support never materialized, and formal requests she had sent to administration that went unanswered. On paper she looked like a victim of systemic failure. When I asked her to identify which of those items she had personally resolved versus which ones she had simply documented, she could name exactly zero. The monkey was not on her back. It was on the system. Her job was to work within that system, not archive evidence of its failures.
What Happens When You Ignore The Monkey
The alternative to managing this is not neutrality. If you do not enforce monkey ownership, the high performers will absorb everyone else's responsibilities until they either burn out or leave. This is not hypothetical. I have seen it happen in three different schools. The pattern is identical every time. A department loses its two strongest teachers within eighteen months because they are spending forty percent of their workday solving problems that belong to other people. The remaining staff rationalize it as teamwork. It is not teamwork. It is extraction. Conversely, if you enforce monkey ownership too rigidly without diagnosing whether someone genuinely needs help, you create a culture where asking for assistance is pathologized. Teachers will stop coming to you entirely rather than risk having the monkey slapped back onto them. That is worse than the original problem because now you have no visibility into actual struggles until they become crises. The middle ground is awkward and requires constant judgment calls. There is no clean algorithm for it. The book remains useful precisely because it is blunt. Most leadership advice for educators is designed to feel encouraging. This one is designed to make you uncomfortable. The discomfort is the point. Protecting good people from liars, criers, and slackers requires being willing to be the annoying administrator who asks for next steps instead of excuses. Most people do not want to be that person. That is why the method fails more often than it succeeds.
