The Rule of 3
“Got any advice for me as I take on my first manager role?” “You absolutely must learn the ‘rule of 3’.” Surprised, I said, “You’ve never once mentioned the ‘rule of 3’ before, and now you’re saying it’s critically important!? What is it?”
He explained, “You will have a large, inexperienced team; many people will be clamoring for your attention. When someone comes to you with a problem, do not get involved or take action (yet). If they come back a second time, you can likely still wait before taking any action. If they come back a third time, it’s probably something important enough to get involved in.”
It was sage advice. I applied the “rule of 3” as a guideline for prioritizing pop-up requests from my team members all the time and it proved quite handy. It saved me from getting drawn into so many random requests that were not critical, allowing me to focus my attention on the truly high-level priorities. It also proved to help my team members, encouraging them take initiative and accelerating their development.
Of course, this way of filtering out less urgent and less important requests must be applied with some judgment. If you want to try using the rule of 3 with your team, consider the following caveats:
1) Some issues are obviously major and you should certainly jump in to help at the first request.
2) You have to get to know your people: some will come to you with every little thing (but if you don’t respond immediately they’ll usually figure things out themselves), while some will wait until the problem is nearly out of control (so you should not defer acting).
3) You must be tactful and preserve relationships, if you are not going to get involved, you have to be firm but also polite and supportive.
Preparing for a presentation is vital in enabling team members to convey critical points, and influence outcomes with customers. Here are the steps involved.
When customer tensions rise, the right approach can turn friction into collaboration. At CAEDENCE, we call it the 3C’s: Calm, Clarify, Control. Here's more detail.
Will AI Replace Direct Customer Communication? Absolutely Not! In an age of chatbots and algorithms, the highest-impact discussions still happen person-to-person.
B2B customer relationships are not a breeze. We’ve navigated hundreds of challenging accounts and distilled five secrets that consistently turn friction into forward progress.
Ever notice how a quick fix from the top can feel like a shortcut, but it ends up stunting your team’s growth? When managers rush to answers, they inadvertently affect team development.
Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
Does your team struggle to deliver the kind of rapid and effective problem-solving your business requires? Can you really afford the unhappy customers, wasted engineering hours, cost of poor quality, and lost opportunities? Use the Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ approach by CAEDENCE.
Negative customer experiences can destroy your business! Have you been faced with any angry customers this year? CAEDENCE's Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ enhanced problem-solving toolkit was the answer. It integrates seamlessly with your existing problem-solving approach and systems.
Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.
