Regardless of where you sit in the organizational hierarchy, daily huddles are a great tool for any team to create engagement, alignment, surface problems, and more. Andy Carlino and Jamie Flinchbaugh discuss daily huddles, which are a great add-on if you watched our last video about scoreboards.
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Tags: Carlino, Flinchbaugh, huddle, scoreboards, teams
Thanks for these videos. Are you considering making them available as a video podcast via Apple iTunes? I’d love to have these automatically download into my iPhone with my other podcasts.
Thanks for the excellent video, guys. I enjoyed it, but I do have a question: let’s say that in the huddle someone surfaces a problem that can’t be solved in the 15 minutes. What happens then? (Presumably postpone it.) And what should the team leader say?
I liked this video and glad that you covered the importance of connecting to “purpose” and the ability to explore on what I call the “intangibles” based on team member observations and perceptions as opposed to data
Thanks for the responses folks.
Dan, thanks for your question. Through the scoreboard, there should be a process and a place for capturing the problems that require attention. This should be an ongoing process. Unless a problem is just a lack of information that you can resolve by sharing the information, you are not likely going to do the problem solving in the huddle.
The team leader, to establish the right behaviors, should always thank people for surfacing problems. This is a behavior that is often not natural, because people associate problems with bad news and no one wants to be the bearer of bad news. We need every opportunity we can find to encourage people to surface problems. You can’t solve the problems that haven’t been surfaced.
Jamie & Andy,
Thanks for the post, I liked this one and wanted to say that I find the daily huddle really useful in a project environment as well. For a recent launch of a new product we used daily huddles (supported with some technology) and found it very successful. A few things that I didn’t hear in your video is cadence and accountability. The daily meetings set a cadence in a project environment such that tasks were getting an improved focus and closed much quicker. The team also started to form a bond and became very candid with each other. If someone promised that something would get done and it didn’t they would put pressure on each other to get it done. This was a far greater impact than I thought it would be in that I saw team members who were by all accounts weak in the beginning of the project holding their own and functioning very well within the team when the accountability was to their teammates. As you noted, surfacing issues, resolving them outside the meeting and then the entire group reflecting on those lessons learned is very important as well. Thanks again for the video!
Ed, obviously we had limited time, as we could probably talk about this for an hour, but those are great adds.
Accountability I think is particularly crucial. By having a cadence, coupled with the visibility of a visual board, things that are not happening should be surfaced, but most importantly surfaced quickly. It’s much easier to manage accountability when the feedback is “that new tool you promised yesterday didn’t arrive” versus “you never do stuff on time.” The latter is less effective. To use your words, Ed, the huddle can add cadence to accountability.
Jamie