How to Get Your Remote Team to Make Decisions You Trust

If the idea of hiring one more person sounds like this is just going to be one more person asking you questions, instead of making decisions that you don’t have to make, then keep listening, as I share the biggest strategy to get your team to make the decisions that you trust.

Welcome to… now, you might be expecting me to say the Eric Dingler Leadership Podcast if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, but today we are relaunching this as the Remote Team Leadership Podcast. So welcome to the Remote Team Leadership Podcast, a show still designed to help you lead better to live better. I’m just taking my name off of it. Why in the world am I doing that?

Because honestly, nobody goes into Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Amazon and searches my name. They search for things like team leadership, remote teams, these kinds of things. So we’re really rebranding to make the podcast more discoverable, because this isn’t about me. This isn’t about me.

This is about helping you, helping leaders like you build and develop amazing teams and lead them so that you live better, that they live better. It’s really about raising the quality of life for you and your family and your team. So my name doesn’t need to be on it. So with that, I’m ready to really just jump right into today’s topic.

And again, this is on how do you get your remote team to make decisions you trust. I mean, after all, isn’t this why you wanted a team? Didn’t you want a team to take things off of your plate so you would have time to put your focus where you want it to go?

Maybe that’s focusing on growing the business. It could be focusing a little bit more time on your health, on a hobby, on a relationship, whatever it might be. You want to have this control over your time. You don’t want to stop working.

Now, if you’re the type of person that is just looking to build something to exit, I’m not the guy that’s going to help you do that. I help the people that like to build and create things and work, but they have never figured out how to crack the code of leadership, which gets your team to make decisions. To get your team to not just make decisions, but to make decisions that you trust.

So I’m going to share this tool with you. Now, when I name it here in just a moment, you might think, oh, I know this already. Oh, I’ve heard this. But I want to challenge you to still listen all the way through so you don’t miss the principle behind the practice.

See, there’s so many times where we hear something, we learn something, and we get focused on the tactic. And I’ve talked about this in the podcast in the past. We see a tactic, we learn about a tactic, we hear about a tactic, and we try to copy the tactic, and it doesn’t work. And so we assume that the tactic is faulty. We assume that the lesson that someone shared was wrong. We assume that, oh, it works for them, but not for me. When in reality, we didn’t understand the principle behind what makes the tactic work.

And so I want to make sure that you stay listening all the way through to the end. Because when I name this tool, some of you are going to have heard this before. It’s not new with me. I didn’t create this. I can say that one of the things that I’ve done with it is put the emphasis on the principle behind it, because that’s where this tool really shines. It’s what makes it work.

All right, so with that, the strategy here that I’m talking about is called 1-3-1. Now, I first learned this from Dave Ramsey. I don’t know if this was in his book on leadership or if it was an EntreLeadership training event, or where it was that I learned this from. But I learned this years and years and years ago when I was still running the summer camp.

You have the people that you’re leading bring to you one problem, three suggested options, three solutions that they see, and the one that they think they should go with, the one they recommend. And then you give them coaching feedback. And then eventually you’ll have coached them enough on this that you’ll either see that they can make the decisions and you trust them, or you might see that they need some more upskilling, some more training, some more development.

Where I have found the difference maker for me in 1-3-1 lies is this. You tell your people, okay, listen, every time you have a question that you can’t figure out how to solve, or maybe it’s something specific I’m not even letting you do yet (and I’ll give some examples here in a second), you’re going to show me, for every one problem… we’re going to work on one thing at a time. For every one problem, you’re going to give me three options, the one you think we should go with, and why you think we should go with it.

And it’s the “and why” that makes all the difference.

So what does this look like practically? Well, for example, when we hire a new team member at the agency that I run, we will say, hey, listen, before you can respond to a ticket, before you can reply to a client… you have obviously gone through our communication training, but then we’re going to say, listen, give me three options of ways that you could handle this ticket, or three options of the way you could respond to this situation, the one you think we should go with, and why.

And when they share the “and why” with us, there’s a very specific thing we’re listening for. And that thing that we’re listening for is one of our core values, or something very close to one of our core values. Now, whenever possible, we want a core value to be behind the decision. Because you see, your core values are what guide the behavior, the decision making, of your team.

And if your core values don’t do that, if you don’t have core values in place that work as a decision filter, then you don’t have the right core values in place. You’ve got some work to do as a business owner, and that’s okay. You don’t have to do that alone. That’s one of the things that I do a lot of with people. I help them develop and wordsmith that vision, mission, and those core values, because the core values are crucially important because of this tool right here.

You know, let me tell you a quick story. Several months ago now, my family and I were going out camping, and when we were driving out into the woods and getting close to where we were going to be camping, our cell phone service started to cut out. And so we’re driving along and I get a text message, and I asked my wife if she could look and see who had messaged me. And here it was, one of our clients.

Now, most clients don’t have my cell phone number anymore. Only clients that have been with us from the very beginning, when I was a solo operator, had that level of access to me when they came in, and most of them still have that level of access to me. New clients just simply don’t.

But this was one of the OGs, one of the original clients from back in the day when I was starting out by myself. And so he messaged me, and he’s like, major problem with our orders coming in on the website. And so I had my wife ask him what was going on, and he gave me a little more detail, and I said, okay, I’ll get Peter on it. And so we were able to get a message out to Peter, and he’s our director of web services, and he said he would take care of it.

And my wife sent that message on to our client. And our client’s response was, “I expect Eric to call me by the end of today.”

And I called him four days later.

We just headed on into the woods and got to our campsite. And a little bit later our friends got there, and we had a great time. The next day I went on a hike with my son, and we went fishing, and my family and I all went down to the lake, and my daughter and I spent time working on paintings, and some of the other kids were fishing, and my wife sat and read a book. And again, we hung out with our friends, and we had a great weekend camping.

And when we got back and I called the client, he was fine. He was completely fine. And I really believed that he would be. And he couldn’t say enough great things about how Peter had handled the situation.

And I had already known this, because my first call was to Peter. And when Peter told me what the problem was and how he solved it, I asked him, well, why did you choose that way to solve it? And he said, well, I thought about it, and I thought, well, what are my three options I could do?

I could just create a video and send it to the client and say, this is what you need to do throughout the weekend until we can get a fix built.

I could have just emailed him and said, hey, we’re really sorry, this is happening, but there’s a plugin that’s messed up and we need to wait for the developer of this software to get a fix, and they’re closed for the weekend, so this is going to have to wait till Monday.

He’s like, but then I thought, the third option is I could just, all weekend long, every two hours, go into his website and take care of the problem manually.

And he said, I decided to go with that because a first class experience isn’t when we put a problem back on a client. A first class experience is we just take care of it. And first class experience is one of our… in fact, it’s our first core value for our agency.

And so here was Peter handling a situation that we could have never prepared for. We didn’t practice this. I never sat down one day and said, if I’m ever gone, and this one plugin that we only use on one of several hundred sites (it’s the only place it’s used, it just does this one thing on this custom setup)… out of all the hundreds of plugins, and out of all of the thousands and literally tens of thousands of customizations across all the sites that we have, if this one breaks, then what I need you to do is go in and do this manually every two hours until we get a repair back from the developer.

I couldn’t. There’s no way I could have thought of every single possible scenario and sat down and trained my staff on every single possible scenario. So how did Peter get to this point where, on Friday, after we got to the site and got things set up, my wife looked at me and she’s like, do you need to drive back out and check on things? And I went, no, no. Peter’s got it.

And I knew Peter had it, because Peter’s been with us for six years now, and Peter and I have 1-3-1’d countless things. And now Peter uses this with the people he’s leading. He’s got people on the In Transit Studios team coming to him with the one problem, the three option solutions, and the one that they think they should do.

And he’s listening for the core value, and he’s saying, oh, here’s the thing we’re going to do, and the reason we’re going to do it is because of this. And so Peter evaluated the problem and came up with three options. We always want to consider the third option. He considered the third option, and he chose the one that was best because of our operating core values.

This happens in my company over and over. This is why my team is able to handle In Transit Studios, and I’m only working on the agency a few hours a week, because my team has been developed to make the decisions I would make as if I was there.

And how did we get to that point? I sat down and figured out, how do I make decisions? What values drive my decisions? And are there any values that I wish we had, or that I wish I had, or that I wish I did better at? And there were some. I even added some values and had to learn to operate out of those values to get the results I wanted to get.

And so as we had those values, I started constantly… I’m constantly talking to my team about values, reinforcing values. When we catch somebody using one of our values, that’s what I want to reward. Every time I tell somebody on my team, hey, good job, I’m connecting the outcome that I’m praising to a core value. Everything centers around our core values.

Now, I talk more about this in chapter 13 of my new book. If you haven’t read Hire to Grow yet, I really would encourage you to do that. If you’re listening and you haven’t hired yet, or you’ve hired and it hasn’t worked out, this book is very specifically designed to take you through the entire hiring process. But if you have a team, then you can check out the last part of the book. This is in part six of the book, where we talk about developing our team. And chapter 13 is called The Feedback Loop.

And part of the feedback loop is 1-3-1. And you’re going to have these conversations over and over. When Emily started, one of the things that we had her do before she answered emails in my email box was, what are three potential answers to this email? Which one do you want to send, and why?

And then I listen for the why. And if the why wasn’t there, and the thing that my team member is recommending is still the right answer but for the wrong reason, then I just tell them that. I say, hey, you know what? Actually, that is the one I want you to send, but that’s not the reason I want you to send it. The reason I want you to send it is because of this. And then I give the value.

Or if they give the three options and I don’t like the one they chose, because it doesn’t align to any of our values and one of the other ones does, then I’ll say, hey, listen, actually I want you to go with number two because of this value.

And if none of their three connect to any of our values, then I just say, hey, you know what, I appreciate you coming up with all three of those, because we always want to consider the third option, and so you did the right thing there. But here’s how I actually want you to respond to this. Here’s how I want you to handle this. And this is why. And then I bring in a value.

It’s always, what is the why? The values we have should determine the decisions you’re making. And if they’re not, then they’re not really values, or they’re not values yet.

And so you, as the business owner listening to this, as the person that is leading a team, you have to understand the values. You have to understand the values that you want used as the filter for every decision.

Now, there are times when your values will conflict with each other. Okay? There are times that one value might be in conflict with the other. You may say we value on-time delivery and on-budget cost. Well, at some point those are going to conflict. You’re going to have to go over budget to get it done on time, or vice versa. And you have to have developed in your team, you have to have modeled for your team and trained your team, to understand the hierarchy of your values. Because there is going to be a hierarchy to your values.

So if you are leading anyone and they keep bringing you problems, and you’re going, gosh, all they do is ask me questions, they don’t solve things, the first time they run into a problem they come to me… well, here’s how I do it.

If my team has a “how do I do something” question, how do I do this, and they could have asked Google or YouTube first, or even AI now, then ask that. Don’t ask me how to do something when you can research and find the answer somewhere else, because honestly, a lot of times I’m going to have to look that up.

Or, how do we do something as a company? We’ll look in our SOPs first. If it’s not in the SOP vault and it’s a very specific company operational thing, well, then you’ve got to ask. But don’t come and ask me how to solve a problem with your calendar. I don’t know. I’m going to have to Google it. So you might as well Google it. And also, sometimes when people ask me questions, if I catch myself going to Google how to do it, I just stop myself and say, listen, I don’t know, I’m going to ask Google, so I just need you to ask Google. And that’s okay.

But if it’s anything outside of a how-to, and it’s, how do I solve this problem? How do I approach this issue? How do I do this for this client? What’s the best way to do this thing? Then I want a 1-3-1. What’s the one problem you’re trying to solve? What’s the one thing you’re trying to do? What are the three options that you see? And which one do you think we should go with, and why?

And a lot of times my team would ask me questions from time to time. Not as much anymore. It now happens more and more to Peter. But if your team asks you a question, you need to put it back on them and say, 1-3-1. You give your team a shared language.

And how do you do that? Well, you just sit down with your team. One day, you get everybody on Zoom and you say, hey, listen, I’m introducing this new thing. And the reason I’m introducing this is so you can work faster. This is going to eliminate you having to come to me all the time with questions. Starting out, you’re still going to come to me with questions, but every time you bring me a question, it has to come to me in this format. What’s the one thing you’re asking? What’s the one problem you’re trying to solve? What are the three possible options you see to solve it? And which one do you think we should go with, and why?

I’m going to tell you something right now. The moment you start this, you’ll get less questions. Because oftentimes, as soon as somebody goes, oh, well, before I send this to the boss, he’s going to want my three options. And so let’s see. So then they start thinking, and they’re like, well, I could do this or I could do this. Now, that’s where most people get stuck. Then they get like, oh, I don’t know which one do I want, and they kind of get paralyzed with that. But the moment they start to think, I have a third option, all of a sudden they come up with a third option that makes the first two obviously the bad choice. It’s just obvious. And so the answer becomes crystal clear to them without even having to ask.

And you’re going to absolutely be thrilled with that. And the times that it doesn’t, they’re going to come to you. You’re going to see the three options and the why. And like I said, the why is the most important thing. You’re more interested in the why than the what. The what’s, again, whatever. You’ll get there. But it’s the why. You want your team to consider your whys, your values.

This is how they’re eventually going to get to the point where you’re going to say, listen, I trust you. Just keep making decisions. The last three times, the last five times, the last dozen times, whatever it is for you, the last X number of times you’ve brought this to me, your reason why has always been sound. You’re using our values. So just keep doing that, and just make decisions. And as long as your decisions are based upon our values, I’ll always have your back. I’ll always have your back in every decision, as long as it’s based upon our values. So just keep making those decisions.

Now, you might be thinking, well, I’m just going to tell my team, hey, here are the values, and we always make decisions based upon our values. I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that. Leadership doesn’t happen in the absence of relationship. And so you don’t want to give up the relationship.

Somebody recently suggested that I build an AI, that your team could just ask your AI, and it could look at your core values, and man, you’d have a whole decision making filter matrix for your business. No, I don’t want that either. I don’t want that either, because again, leadership can’t happen in the absence of relationship. And so I don’t want to give up leadership. I don’t want to give up relationship.

I want to be able to give feedback, and I want to be able to see their response and hear their response. I want to be able to engage with the person and make sure that, in the moment, they’re really making the connection. And the great thing about leveraging tools of today, like AI, to handle more and more tasks that are easily automated is it’s freeing us up with more time for leadership, which is really exciting and pretty cool.

Okay, my friend, well, with that, this is the whole topic I wanted to talk about today. Getting your remote team to make decisions you trust happens with 1-3-1 focused on the why.

If you want to learn more about it, again, chapter 13 of my book, Hire to Grow. You can head over to EricDingler.com. Brand new website. Super excited about it. Really proud of the team on it. But you go to EricDingler.com, just click Book at the top. It’ll take you to the landing page there, and you can learn more about Hire to Grow.

And then outside of that, make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast and leave us a review. And if you’re on Spotify, hit us up with a comment. That’s the greatest thing you could do. If you made it this far and this was helpful to you, then the best way to say thank you, honestly, is a subscribe and a review. Would love to see those.

So until next time, I want to encourage you to take action. Utilize 1-3-1 focused on the why, and it’ll help you lead better to live better.