The 1:3:1 rule

I really wish I knew this when I made my first hires and my team counted about forty people.

I always loved working with people and building teams. Creating an exciting atmosphere of possibilities and turning dreams into reality. It’s amazing how far you can get in little time when you’re together instead of alone.

My father always joked about the Chinese or Jewish saying ‘I wish you many employees’.

And of course you can’t ignore the challenges that you will face when building a team.

I believe however that the root cause of this saying is considering yourself the most important person in the company, believing only you can solve problems and keeping control of everything.

Replace ‘you’ by ‘Josh’ in this story because I’m obviously guilty of this.

Fortunately I have learned to get out of the way and trust others and empower them to find solutions.

Dan Martell describes a powerful hack, in his book ‘Buy Back Your Time’, that he uses in his organisations to prevent ‘upward delegating’.

Here is how it works.

Anytime someone runs into a challenge, or gets stuck, they will think about their 1:3:1’s without asking their direct report. Because well, you hired them for their expertise and they are most likely to come up with better solutions than you.

1: Define the one problem that needs to be solved.

3: Offer three viable solutions.

1: Make one suggestion from that list of possible solutions.

I find that this works incredibly well for me and I even use it in my personal life to find great solutions and move quickly.

And for bigger challenges and problems, I break it up in bite-size chunks. Very often things become much easier as I see that a certain possible solution solves more than one problem at the same time.

For example, with Business Club Côte d’Azur I was having some scalability issues on almost every front when I thought about attracting more members - how to organise more meetups with only so many days in the week? how to ensure good attendance to all meetups? how can we make it easier to connect with others? etc. etc.

I wrote each of these questions and challenges down as one problem that needed to be solved.

Then brainstormed possible solutions and chose the three best ones for me.

At last I suggested one of these solutions as if I were making a recommendation to my client or direct report.

In case you are wondering, one of the solutions that kept coming back for me is building an app. Now you know what we’re working on in the background.

✅ 4/100

PS what do you think about this 1:3:1 rule? Are you going to try it?