The Rule of Three

Transcript based on the video’s automatic captions.

If leadership roles are unclear, decisions always flow upward. This doesn't happen because your people are incapable. It happens because your system teaches them to wait. Most CEOs believe they are the bottleneck because they haven't empowered their team enough. This is rarely true. Decisions escalate for three structural reasons. First, ownership is unclear. If two people might own a decision, neither owns it and it comes to you. Second, the authority is shared. Shared authority is functionally the same as no authority, and third is fear. The cost of making a mistake feels higher than the cost of waiting for your approval. Over time, you become the default decision maker, not by choice, but by design. Pause the video and pick up the decision load inventory from your download packet. We're going to conduct a quick audit of your inbox and meeting agenda. I want you to list the top 10 decisions that are sitting on your desk right now. Are you approving pricing? Are you mediating a conflict between sales and ops? Are you signing off on a $500 expense? Write them down. Be specific. Here's the rule for this exercise. Do not delegate them yet. Do not try to fix the list. I just want you to stare at it. Look at each of them and ask, why did this have to come to me? If the answer is habit or just to be safe, you found your constraint. If you have more than three decisions on the list, that should be handled by an operator or Prophet, your leadership architecture is broken. A business cannot scale beyond the level at which it still depends on you to decide. Complete the inventory, make the escalation visible. Once you see the weight of what you are carrying, we will look at what needs to be killed. Then proceed to module four.