What is a Daily Huddle?
A daily huddle is where you bring your team together at the same time each day and ask them these three questions:
- What did we achieve yesterday?
- What are our priorities for today?
- Did we identify any roadblocks?
For this to be successful, you would need to do this consistently, and it needs to be done at the same time and in the same place every day. Are you the only person on your team? Then this is still a priority. Will you be away for the day? Then your team is to continue to do this without you.
What will be the outcome?
The outcome of a daily huddle will be that you have a highly motivated, successful, self-managed team.
Over time, your team will become more forward-thinking. Instead of saying, “I have nothing to do.” they will say, “I have completed my tasks for the day. Does anyone need help?” Additionally, instead of ‘battling on,’ wasting valuable time and resources, when a team member struggles, they will have the confidence to ask for help from you and the rest of their team.
Then, one day your team will be saying, “Wow! Look what we achieved yesterday. We did a great job.”
Over time, your team’s success will happen daily. Your team will consistently prioritize and re-prioritize, and you will all be working together to unlock the roadblocks you encounter. Once this happens, your skilled team will be highly motivated, and this team will use these skills effectively and efficiently in the workplace.
What’s next?
When your daily huddle is consistently happening, the next step is to have your team email their reports to you each Friday afternoon with the answers to the following three questions:
- What did you achieve this week?
- What are your priorities for next week?
- What roadblocks did you encounter?
Once you have received their email, you will re-forward the previous week’s email sent to you. The purpose of this is to see what each team member has advised they would achieve from last week’s email. Did they reach their goals, and if not, why not?
Did they reassess and rearrange their priorities when they could not finish a task, or did new priorities arrive? Did they encounter any real roadblocks, or was this an excuse for not completing their assigned tasks? Do they have a plan to rectify the situation?
What is a leader’s job?
As a leader, our job is to teach our staff to think. We are to teach them how to find a solution to their problems. They are to look for answers both inside and outside the square.
So once your huddle is now a daily habit and the Friday reports arrive consistently each week, your next step is to organise a monthly review.
This review reports the completed achievement over the last month.
Each member of the team receives a 3-minute update
- What did we achieve this month?
- What are our priorities for next month?
- What roadblocks do you think we will encounter?
At the end of the meeting, you will request that everyone brainstorms their priorities for next month and what they feel are the most important to have the entire team think tank around. Pick the top one or two areas and spend the 10 to 15 minutes think tanking as a team as to the biggest priority for the team for the next week.
Once you have done this for three months, you will sit down as a team and do a quarterly review.
- What did we achieve last quarter?
- What are our priorities for the next quarter?
- What potential systematic risks will affect our quarterly plan?
Then, at the 12 month mark and every 12 months after that, you sit down as an entire team and identify what you have achieved in the last year?
- What are our priorities for next year?
- Have they aligned with our three-year strategic plan?
- What potential systematic risks will affect our quarterly plan?
- Do we need more systems, processes, funding, or staff?
You will find that your daily huddle will eventually become a strategic plan from just three questions a day.