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.
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