Is your daily huddle a daily grind? Try these 5 proven strategies to up your game

Keep your daily standup meetings short and to the point if you want people to attend.

Ever since Jeff Sutherland and Keith Schwebel presented their seminal paper on Scrum at the OOPSLA conference back in 1995, people have been trying to figure out how to run effective daily team meetings. Whether you call them standups, scrums, or huddles, these daily gatherings all face the same challenges.

And after almost a decade of coaching teams on Lean/Agile practices, I've seen my share of failures. The fact is every team I've ever coached--be it the highest level leadership team or a more junior development team--have all struggled with getting the daily team meeting right.

The daily team meeting is short, but it's extremely important. It's where the course is constantly monitored and corrected. Teams who are misaligned and don't continuously coordinate actions, run the risk of severe failure in performance over time. Checking in and making small corrections is the key to keeping projects and teams on target.

Over the years, I've seen several common problems and have developed simple solutions. Here are some suggestions you can apply tomorrow at your meeting to improve its effectiveness.

Start at an odd time

I've found that many organizations are lazy with their meetings. When someone schedules a 9:00 a.m. meeting, people will stroll in 9:05 without a second thought. Then people wait until 9:10 to actually get going on the agenda. For daily meetings, this is a killer. These get-togethers need to be no more than 15 minutes.

To break people's bad meeting habits, use an irregular start time. If you're thinking of 9:00 am daily meeting, make it 9:04 or 9:07. This will call attention to the time and encourage people to be there at the appointed minute. A few minutes after the hour also gives people a little buffer if their previous meeting finishes at 9:00.

Have everyone write down their updates

Nothing kills a standup faster than watching someone stare at the ceiling trying to remember what they did yesterday while everyone watches them scratch their chin. This will frustrate even the most patient of team members.

Avoid wasting the team's time by having everyone write down their updates on a notecard before the meeting. Have a stack of 3x5 index cards handy for people to scratch a few notes before things kick off. At the beginning of the meeting, instruct people to show their notes and only let people speak who have taken the time to organize their thoughts. Being skipped during updates will quickly change behavior.

Set a timer everyone can see

Everyone will naturally elaborate and want to dive into details. While some people understand the advantage of setting a timer, most teams have someone set a watch timer and then say something when the time is up. This leads to people being cut off or forced to quickly wrap up and cut out important information.

Instead, use a large, visible timer that everyone can see. I've had teams use big LED timers like in my local Crossfit box. The big red numbers counting down show everyone exactly how much time is left. Additionally, utilizing the buzz or beep feature on the clock avoids someone having to be the bad guy and interrupt the person currently speaking.

Stay focused on the three core questions

Rambling is a typical challenge. It's natural and, left unchecked, will continue to happen. The daily meeting is about coordinating and identifying issues. It's not for digging in. Delving into details is not part of the daily meeting and wastes the valuable time.

The fix to this, keep everyone to the three core questions: what did you get done yesterday, what are you doing today, and what's in your way. By sticking to these and keeping answers quick, you'll avoid the pull of the tall grass. If you hear someone going into the thicket, call it out and suggest that it be a follow up conversation right after the meeting. A good practice is to schedule another 15 minutes after the standup for those people that need time and space to dig into something. Let everyone else leave on time.

End on time, no matter what

Many teams who start doing standups spend way too much time in them. I've heard of new standups lasting 30 or even 60 minutes. At the end of the meeting, they all agree that they need to make it shorter. Then the next day it takes just as long, sometimes longer.

Instead, I suggest teams agree to a 15-minute guarantee. Set a 15-minute timer for the meeting, then when the timer goes off, the meeting is automatically and immediately over--no matter what. Even if someone is mid-sentence, end the meeting and thank everyone for coming. By promising to end the meeting in 15 minutes, people are more likely to attend the next one. The next time the team meets, everyone is acutely aware of the time and keeps everyone on task and on point. The challenge becomes getting the most out of the 15 minutes rather than trying to shorten an overly long meeting.

Daily team meetings are not easy, and teams that do them well have worked hard on perfecting the process and the timing of the agenda. By following these suggestions, you'll avoid the common pitfalls and get better, faster.

5 Meetings Every Company Needs to Master If They Want To Thrive

Everyone loves to hate meetings, but get these five right and you'll see the power of coming together with purpose.

I've read many articles that rail against meetings and how they are a waste of time. And I would agree that many meetings held by most business are just that. However, it turns out that meetings are a necessary part of any business operation. People need to come together to develop ideas, discuss issues, make decisions, and coordinate activities. Without these meetings, people and teams would wander aimlessly and work at cross purposes.

Great companies who have grown quickly, easily, and with little drama, have developed not just good meeting habits, but great meeting rhythms. If you want to scale your business and do so with ease and laser focus, work on implementing these five key meeting rhythms.

1. Annual Strategy: 1 to 2 days, once a year.

Once a year take the time and step back from the business and think about your long-term goals. Traditional industries can look out up to five years. If you're in a more modern, faster-pace industry, focus on your three-year goals. For cutting-edge, quick-moving markets, focus on 18-24 months out.

Start by taking stock of the current situation of your business. What's working well and what is not? Then focus on understanding what your competitors are doing. What moves are they making? Finally, look at the industry dynamics. What broader business trends are underway? Use that data to look into the future to see where the new opportunities are likely to be. How you can position yourself to be in the best place possible to take advantage of those?

2. Quarterly Objectives: half a day to 1 day, every quarter.

Once a quarter decide which priorities and objectives will be most important over the next 90-days to move you towards your long-term strategy. The key here is to create focus. Choose the 3-5 things that really need attention from the senior team to drive the firm's strategy forward. This isn't about planning regular work; this is the strategic work that otherwise would not get done without dedicated effort.

3. Monthly Review: 2 to 4 hours, once a month.

The monthly review is simple: it's a status check and course correction forum. Don't make any changes to your quarterly plans unless something is seriously off or you realize that you chose the wrong objectives. The three key questions we ask here are as follows: What's working? What's not? What do we need to do to get things back on track?

4. Weekly Priorities: 30 minutes to 1 hour, once a week.

This is a key meeting for the implementation. This is where people make commitments to what they are going to accomplish over the next seven days. First, the team looks at the quarterly objectives and key results and then team members define--in specific terms--what they will accomplish in the coming week. In this meeting, everyone makes specific commitments for which they know they will be held accountable. Details are captured and written down and everyone leaves the meeting with a clear set of expectations.

5. Daily Huddles: 10 to 15 minutes, every day.

This is an incredibly powerful, but difficult-to-master meeting. The Daily Huddle (or Daily Standup as some people call it) is a very focused coordination and communication tool. Its goal is to let others know what you've recently completed, what you're working on next, and what' obstacles you're facing. Everyone answers three questions in a daily huddle: what did you get done yesterday, what are you doing today, and what's in your way. That's it. Anything else that comes up is taken off line and discussed outside the meeting. Don't be tempted to dig into the details at this time.

If you're having problems keeping your huddle under 15 min, there are a few things you can try. I like to have members write down what they're going to say on a small sticky note so that it's short and sweet. Standing up during the meeting can keep people from getting too comfortable. Also, have an object that each person holds when it's their turn to speak will prevent people from talking over each other.

While making these meetings well-oiled machines takes time and dedication, it takes just a few months most companies start to feel the rhythm. Keeping them short, sweet, and focused on their specific intent accelerates the learning and adoption of the habits until they become second nature. Once you're in the swing you can pick up the pace and use them to accelerate the rate of your business growth.

Here Is The Meeting To Use To Learn From Your Mistakes

Reviewing your past results to make future improvements is key to getting better. Here's how you do it.

At its core, innovation is the ability to adjust quickly to new conditions and situations in novel and useful ways. As Stephen Hawking, world-renowned physicist, famously said "intelligence is the ability to adapt to change." It's just as true in businesses as in biology.

Toyota has been one of the best companies to leverage this idea over the last decade. They have built a culture centered around the idea of continuous improvement and have used that to dominate the automotive market since the late 1990s. By systematically looking at what's working and what's not -- a process Toyota calls Kaizen -- they find root causes to waste and then build systemic solutions that foolproof procedures and bake in quality.

Another organization to leverage the art of continuous improvement is the US Military. Teams like the Navy Seals use After Action Reviews -- AARs as they are known -- to systematically review recent performance and critically examine what went right, what went wrong, and what needs to improve.

The rate that an organization can learn from its own successes and failures defines how quickly it can evolve its own business. Just like in biology, the organization which can learn and adapt the fastest will rise to the top.

While building a learning-centered organization is not easy, continuous improvement starts with a simple process that any team, in any company, can easily adopt. It's called a Retrospective. Here are the core steps to creating a successful retrospective and how you can introduce it into your organization or business.

1. Create a safe environment

Before engaging in any type of critical review you need to create a place where people feel safe to discuss failures and shortcomings. If not, you'll never get the right information on the table. And it's not just the things that might make the person offering the feedback look bad. People may be willing to risk themselves, but without assurances of safety they won't say anything that will jeopardize someone else's reputation.

The best way to do this is to have the senior team members model this behavior. They should talk about mistakes they've made and mistakes other senior folks have made and how discussing them honestly leads to critical improvements.

2. Collect relevant data

Start with the facts. What data do you have about what happened and what was achieved? Keep it neutral and without judgment. I like timelines where people can post notes on what occurred in time sequence. Have people use calendars, emails, etc. to get the details correct and accurate.

More is better than less in this stage and I generally make sure we allocate plenty of time collecting this important data. Often critical details come to people after they've sat in silence for a while thinking. Don't rush this stage.

3. Develop insights and inferences

Once you have the data on the table, you can begin to process it into insights and inferences. This is second-order thinking. The goal here is to make connections between the data; look for relationships, patterns, gaps/omissions, and correlations.

Key to this step is digging into what you see to find root causes. Toyota developed a process called The Five Whys, whereby they look at something that went wrong and ask 'why?' five times to get to the source of the problem. Other approaches include Fish Bone Diagrams and Mindmapping.

4. Brainstorm possible changes to make

At this point you can begin to develop ideas for possible actions to take. It's important here to not jump to commitments too quickly. Stay in brainstorming mode and encourage any idea, regardless of how crazy it sounds. Consider any option that comes up, and build on ideas to create new possibilities.

5. Focus and commit to specific actions

Once you have several ideas and options on the table, sort by impact and complexity. Get quick commitments on the easy-to-implement/high-impact ideas and then move to the harder-to-implement/high-impact ideas. Make sure your commitments include who will do what by when. Capture these and distribute them to the entire team.

6. Track and measure impact

Finally, track the impact and outcomes of your changes. Put a reminder in the calendar or add a step to your next retrospective to review changes that have been implemented to ensure they are achieving the intended results. If not, retrospect those and find new approaches to take. If you're still getting the same results, you're most likely not effectively addressing the root cause of the issue.

While the art of continuous improvement takes a long time to truly master, these steps will get you off on the right foot with the right structure. And of course, what's the best way to improve your retrospective process? Run a retrospective on your retrospective of course.