Episode 508: The Chief Problem Solver

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On this podcast, we help people get above the business, not just work on it or in it, but get above the business. When you're above the business, you can begin to think like an architect. Once you begin to think like an architect, you can design the blueprint to grow your small business. In this episode, I want to talk about the Chief Problem Solver. How a few weeks ago, if you go back, I believe it was on September 19th, I dropped the podcast that was called The One Hat That Replaces All Others. And there was this idea that if you could become the architect of your business, if you could put the hat on of being the architect of your business, you may begin to eliminate some of the other hats that you have to wear in business. Well, in addition to this, I heard this, and I'm not going to share where I picked it up because for the most part In fact, pretty much everything else that this person has put out, I've kind of philosophically, fundamentally agreed with. And so this is not a take to be contrarian, but it was one of those things where I thought, do I actually believe that? Do I agree with that? And it was this idea that you need to be the chief problem solver, the CPS, instead of just the CEO, the chief problem solver. Fundamentally, I disagree with that. I think if you are the chief problem solver, you are what we talk about of remaining the rainmaker of your business, that everything, all of the decisions and all of the problems come to you. If you're the chief problem solver, that you might as well be your name GPT. In other words, if they have a question, a problem, or something they want answers to, instead of working for your team, working to be— find the resources and to be resourceful, what are they going to do? They're going to come to you. And that's really ultimately the thing that we want to take this concept. And how do we not be the chief problem solver? And I'm going to share with you a framework that I picked up from Dan Martell, which I think is fantastic. And so it's this idea that we don't want to be the chief problem solver. We want our team to begin to try to learn to solve problems on their own, that they become resourceful and that they use the resources. And then when they do, they run out of options, or at least what they think they run out of options with, then they come to you. But with— it's the part when they come to you, how do we handle that? If they come to us and we immediately give the answer, the problem with that is we begin to reinforce a cycle that they subconsciously— and this is important— that the team subconsciously sees you as the one with all of the answers, and you're not. No business owner at all, from Dan Martell to Keith Cunningham to any Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, whoever you want to put up there at the pedestal, they don't have all the answers. Alex Hormozi does not have all of the answers. I sure as heck do not have all of the answers, and nor would you. Nobody does. But yet that's why business is a team sport, is you can find the team to help you with that. Now, are they going to see you as one that has more of the answers? Sure. So how do we handle it when a team member comes to us to ask a question? Number one, is we want to see what resources and what have they done to try to solve this problem first. What have they thought through? Who, who have they picked up the phone and called? Who else on the team have they reached out to? Did they do any research? Did they utilize AI to try to help them with this problem? Did they go back to past notes? Did they do anything? And if they haven't done that, if they haven't reached out to any resources, and the first person that they've thought to come to is you, well, now you're the bottleneck of your organization. It's the law of the lid. It's the rainmaker, whatever you want to call it. Everything is going to start running through you. So number one, the first step in this is to see and to ask them, well, what have you tried to do to solve this up to this point? The second one is the framework. And this step two is the framework from Dan Martell in his book. I believe this is detailed in his book, Buy Back Your Time, and he calls it the 1-3-1 rule. I think it's great. It is, okay, you've went through, tried to, you know, utilize the resources that you know are at your disposal, um, but what specifically is the problem? And what I like about this is that it forces clarity for them to be able to articulate, just simply put, what is the problem you're trying to solve? What is the issue at hand? Or maybe even, what is the opportunity? But in this case, for the duration of this episode, we're talking about problems, issues, circumstances that need to get fixed. So what is the one problem? Number 2 is the 3, and that is what are 3 potential solutions you believe we could come up with? And that forces them to have to think about, well, here are 3 potential choices. And then the last one is, which, what is the one that you feel like that we should choose? What's the path you believe that we should take? Well, I believe it's this. Now, if they have done those 2 things. Number 1, they have utilized and looked into the resources that they have. They've made phone calls, they've leveraged AI, they've looked back at past meeting notes, they've tried to find assets, they've called somebody else on the team, whatever that looks like. They've been resourceful. Then they come to you. You want them to come with the 1-3-1. What's the one problem? What are three potential solutions? And what is the one path you believe that we need to take? And if they've done those two things and they still are at a loss, then absolutely, that is where you or another leader in the organization can absolutely help guide them. But I think what's important around the guiding and giving, walking them through, is not just to give them the answer. There are times to tell someone or to give someone a fish, but when appropriate, give them the backstory, give them the why, teach them how to fish. How did you arrive at that? You know, there's sometimes as business owners, we, you know, just simply, we have an experience, we have maybe some knowledge, we've read some books, we've, you know, been around other people that the team just doesn't. And there's just moves on the chessboard that they didn't even know that they can make. And that, that certainly can happen. And there are times absolutely to, to help teach someone to fish. And then there are other times that they do just want the fish. But if you give them the fish, try to give them a little bit of knowledge about how you arrived at that, where you learned that from, why that matters, instead of just, here, go do this. It doesn't teach them anything. So number one, let's help them to make sure that they're utilizing and getting access to the resources that can help them to figure out, you know, how to solve an issue or problem. Number two, is let's utilize the 1-3-1 rule. What's the one problem, three potential solutions, and the path that you believe that we should take? If you do those, those two things, I think you can remove yourself as being the chief problem solver. I don't think that's a hat we need to have in our closet at all. Let's remove the notion that we are the chief problem solver. Art of One. Hope this episode served you well. If you like what we do, you want to be able to book in a game plan call. If you'd like to have a blueprint for your small business, go to blueprintos.com and book in a game plan call. We'd love to chat with you. Until next time, lead well and go be great. Hey, and if you're watching this on YouTube, love for you to hit the like and the subscribe button. We got big plans for our YouTube channel in coming in 2026 and in the future. We'd love to be able to have you to share this with one other person as well. All right, see you soon.