Podcast Ep 94 | The Daily Huddle

The dai­ly hud­dle con­nects each day to the week­ly meet­ing. When done cor­rect­ly the dai­ly hud­dle speeds up your busi­ness, aligns teams and heals rela­tion­ships.​But some­times teams won’t fol­low dai­ly hud­dle best prac­tices and end up with long or inef­fec­tive dai­ly huddles.

​The dai­ly stand up meet­ing must be ener­getic and valu­able to all par­tic­i­pants. For most peo­ple, in 10 min­utes or less you’re get­ting the most impor­tant infor­ma­tion and get­ting on your way.
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In this episode, Brad and Kevin dis­cuss why you need a dai­ly hud­dle, what a dai­ly hud­dle agen­da must include, and tips for a suc­cess­ful huddle.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. My name is Brad Giles. And today, I’m joined as always, by my co-host, Kevin Lawrence. Hel­lo, Kevin, how are things today with you?

Kevin Lawrence 00:28

Things are great. Up here in cold Cana­da, we’ve got a whack of snow and notably more snow, and notably more cold tem­per­a­tures than we nor­mal­ly get. So, but a boy does make every­thing look beau­ti­ful. So I’m doing great.

Brad Giles 00:48

Good to hear. Well, obvi­ous­ly the oppo­site here. It’s beau­ti­ful sum­mer time here. And so as always, we like to start with a word or thought of the day. Kevin, what do you have today for us?

Kevin Lawrence 01:21

Yeah, cult like cul­ture is kind of the phrase of the day, had din­ner with friends tonight. And we got talk­ing about a reli­gion that won’t be named, and their incred­i­ble cult like cul­ture. And, you know, they’ve had some expe­ri­ences with that par­tic­u­lar thing to the point where there were some, some bad expe­ri­ences they had when they decid­ed that they were going to move on. And just the pow­er and the grip that the cul­ture had on the mem­bers of that com­mu­ni­ty, and par­tic­u­lar­ly him. And but we had a con­ver­sa­tion after he shared a lit­tle bit of talk­ing about how, you know, great com­pa­nies find ways to bring peo­ple in and meet all of their needs, and they have the bonds and the rela­tion­ships and all of the things like why would they want to go. And so if we take the health­i­est part of cult like cul­tures, that is what a great com­mu­ni­ty is, it’s what a great com­pa­ny is. And, you know, in think­ing about the com­pa­nies that we work with, and think our own firm, you know, what does it take to have that cult like, culture?

Brad Giles 02:38

That’s awe­some. Yeah, cul­ture. It’s, it’s so divi­sive for many peo­ple, but for many com­pa­nies to get what they think might be right, maybe they think they’ve got a good one. But you know, hav­ing a con­scious cul­ture or con­scious­ly build­ing the kind of cul­ture that you work with, that you work with to build your strat­e­gy or that aligns with the needs of your strat­e­gy and your cus­tomer, when that’s where the real gains are made, isn’t it?

Kevin Lawrence 03:09

Yep, sure is. How about you? What’s your word of the day?

Brad Giles 03:14

Yeah, so mine, fun­ni­ly enough, was strat­e­gy. So yeah, some weird words there. But what’s your strat­e­gy to build your cul­ture? And, and that’s, that’s because it’s some­thing that you need to work on. It’s some­thing that you need to have, you know, con­scious­ly mapped out not just pic­tures, it was iron­ic that you said that that’s why I loved at the time. But yeah, it’s some­thing that you need to have devel­oped, like, even if you haven’t mapped it out, like, what is the strat­e­gy for your cul­ture? How are you going to build the kind of cul­ture that will attract the top per­form­ers in your mar­ket? Some­thing that, you know, I’ve cer­tain­ly spo­ken about so much on this podcast?

Kevin Lawrence 04:02

Yep, for sure. So today we are talk­ing and this is episode num­ber 94. We’re get­ting close to the mag­i­cal 100^th episode. Well, mag­i­cal because in our mind, it’s a mile­stone to cross. But today, we’re talk­ing about some­thing real­ly excit­ing. And it’s, it’s meant to be excit­ing and impact­ful on a dai­ly basis for most peo­ple, Brad. So what is this episode about?

Brad Giles 04:30

Yeah, so over the last few weeks, we’ve gone through the annu­al meet­ing, the quar­ter­ly meet­ing, the month­ly meet­ing, the week­ly meet­ing, and today we round­ed out with of course, the Dai­ly Exe­cu­tion meet­ing. And this is the thing that kind of stitch­es it all togeth­er in terms of exe­cu­tion and some­thing, some­thing that peo­ple are very reluc­tant to do at the out­set. So yeah, today we’re talk­ing about the dai­ly hud­dle and how The Dai­ly hud­dle weaves togeth­er, the week­ly and the month­ly and the quar­ter­ly and even the annu­al in terms of execution.

Kevin Lawrence 05:09

Awe­some. And I will tell you, when I first start heard about dai­ly meet­ings, I thought they were a lit­tle weird. And I thought that they were overkill, I was quite skep­ti­cal. And I will tell you, it’s, you know, it’s get­ting close to 20 years of using them with dif­fer­ent clients. And from the first client I test­ed them on, they were amaz­ing­ly impact­ful. And often, they don’t work in com­pa­nies. Yeah. And it’s not that they don’t work because they could­n’t work. They don’t work because peo­ple don’t real­ly under­stand them well enough, and to bring them to life, or they don’t have the rig­or or dis­ci­pline to keep them going when it gets a bit bumpy, but hands down one of the most impact­ful meet­ings that you can have. And fas­ci­nat­ing­ly, it is a nat­ur­al instinct to have a dai­ly meet­ing when we get into cri­sis sit­u­a­tions or prob­lems. When things don’t work well, with a goal. Let’s just talk about this every day until we fix it. Excel­lent. And this is meant to be a proac­tive things to make sure things keep going well. And they’re very impact­ful. We’re going to dis­pel a few myths today give you a few strate­gies that we’ve seen com­pa­nies use, but it is incred­i­bly impact­ful meeting.

Brad Giles 06:23

So I’d heard about the dai­ly hud­dles, I, you know, read about them, I’d seen oth­ers, but it real­ly did­n’t seem very cul­tur­al­ly appro­pri­ate for me. At the time, this was like 1718 years ago, and I took my lead­er­ship team to see a guy called Jack Dai­ley. You know, Jack, I know, Jack Dai­ley, one of the most fan­tas­tic sales train­ers that you’ve you’ve ever heard of. And we came away, it was a full, inten­sive day with Jack. And we, I brought the lead­er­ship team way. And then I said, Okay, so what’s the num­ber one thing that we’ve got to do. And the lead­er­ship team said, hands down, at the same time, we’ve got to start doing dai­ly han­dles, and that was the cat­a­lyst, I remem­ber it as clear as day for us to start doing dai­ly hud­dle, it was real­ly it came from Jack. And so we start­ed doing them. And I remem­ber, I learned some­thing every sin­gle day that I would nev­er have learned oth­er­wise, yes, about things that were hap­pen­ing in the busi­ness. And there was no oth­er forum for that.

Kevin Lawrence 07:34

And that’s the idea. It’s the cross com­mu­ni­ca­tion across all the dif­fer­ent chan­nels and pieces of the busi­ness so that peo­ple know what’s going on at once. And instead of 10 sep­a­rate con­ver­sa­tions at the old ver­sion, you know, at the water cool­er, or SMS mes­sages these days are vir­tu­al meet­ings. It’s every­one’s in one loop to get in sync. And it’s almost like the, you know, the brief that a team has before they’re going out onto the field in many ways. You imag­ine a sports team, every­one just kind of rolls in shows up at the game and then goes out on the field. They don’t get in sync before they go to their job. It does­n’t make sense. Inter­est­ing­ly, I am, we are up at a place called Kelow­na BC on vaca­tion, which I remem­ber not far from there right now. And with my son, and he was like sev­en years old, and we go into a Wal­mart store. And I see peo­ple in a cir­cle talk­ing. So we go to the aisle behind so we can kind of lis­ten and you know, on their dai­ly hud­dle, and they went through all the things that’s going there, they had their lists that their agen­da that they went through. And at the end, they sang the Wal­mart song. And there is a Wal­mart song and they were singing this song. And every­one’s awk­ward and goofy. And I went up and I talked after to the man­ag­er and one of the peo­ple I’d seen in the meet­ing and asked him about it. And they said, look, they do it once a day, some­times twice. And they move it around the store phys­i­cal­ly so that they can include dif­fer­ent peo­ple on dif­fer­ent days because peo­ple still well the store is run­ning, they’re doing the meet­ing. And I said and I said to them, you know, why does it work so well because every­one knows every­thing that’s going on. We know if there’s a ship­ment com­ing in and we need some more peo­ple in the back. It gives us all our plan for the day. It cre­ates recog­ni­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties in their cul­ture. They say okay, what tell me about the damn song. And the lady with his big goofy smiles like well, you know, it’s a lit­tle awk­ward, but tell you what, we come away feel­ing real­ly, real­ly good and then we get on with our day. So I’m not say­ing you need to do a song yet God has no do not say that Kevin said to do that because some peo­ple will not enjoy it. But it’s a point of uni­fi­ca­tion and bring­ing peo­ple togeth­er and it’s insane­ly powerful.

Brad Giles 10:01

Yeah. So the dai­ly hud­dle. I mean, the real base con­cept is that if you get the dai­ly hud­dle, right, it should save one hour per day of tiny inter­ac­tions, or updates, or emails or access meet­ing times.

Kevin Lawrence 10:29

So real­ly, whilst we’re advo­cat­ing that you need to have anoth­er meet­ing, what we’re real­ly say­ing is that you’re elim­i­nat­ing 10 meet­ings or an hour of wast­ed time?

Brad Giles 10:33

Yeah, yeah. So if you can look at it, inverse­ly, rather than adding, say­ing the rea­son we’re doing it is to take away, you can come at it from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive and a dif­fer­ent set of thinking.

Kevin Lawrence 10:45

And that works. If you fol­low the agen­da and every­thing every­one learns to bring all the data to the dai­ly meet­ing that they need, ver­sus Talk­ing to you after­wards. And if some­one brings up some­thing that should have been shared at the dai­ly with the team, it’s like, Hey, make sure you’re bring­ing that to the dai­ly tomor­row. Yeah. And train­ing every­one that that is that cen­tral com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel on a dai­ly basis for stuff that would impact every­one ver­sus the one on ones which peo­ple some­times default.

Brad Giles 11:16

Yeah. And remem­ber, this is dai­ly, so it’s prob­a­bly four days per week, know­ing that on the fifth day, you might have a week­ly meet­ing, that’s got an aster­ix on it, because it depends on the team that for exam­ple, the Wal­mart team may or may not that you men­tioned may or may not have a week­ly, so they might have five dailies depends, but for the aver­age small to medi­um sized busi­ness in the lead­er­ship team, per­haps you’re only going to have four dailies, and then one week­ly, it’s like

Kevin Lawrence 11:44

Mon­day, you’d have your week­ly and then Tues­day, Wednes­day, Thurs­day, Fri­day, if you work on Mon­day to Fri­day, a week, then you’d have your dailies on those oth­er days just to keep things mov­ing along and stay­ing on track.

Brad Giles 11:54

Yeah, you catch up on those things in for sure.

Kevin Lawrence 11:57

So the key also with a dai­ly meet­ing is it’s meant to be sev­en to 12 min­utes. Now, when we were doing the scal­ing up book, Ver­non, I had a debate about it. And I think it should be sev­en to 10 min­utes. 12 min­utes creeps a lit­tle bit longer. So I am as we debate it, say the 12. But it I say 10 min­utes, max, because once you start creep­ing over 10 min­utes, you can eas­i­ly turn to 20. And here’s the num­ber one way to have an inef­fec­tive dai­ly meet­ing is to go longer than 10 or 12 min­utes, yep. Because if you do, it starts becom­ing 20 min­utes or half an hour, peo­ple start devalu­ing it, and say­ing we should­n’t do it, it’s not valu­able. And they’re right, it’s not worth half an hour a day, unless you’re, you know, in an ER room or some envi­ron­ment where that meet­ing has a lot more meat to it. And is it has some deep­er diag­nos­tics or things like that. But gen­er­al­ly for most peo­ple, under 10 min­utes, you’re get­ting the most impor­tant infor­ma­tion and get­ting on your way.

Brad Giles 13:03

Well, as soon as it goes to 20 or 25 min­utes, every­one, it sig­nif­i­cant­ly impacts some­one’s day, in 10 min­utes, it’s like you can catch up on that. And it’s a lot eas­i­er pill to swallow.

Kevin Lawrence 13:20

It is an impact some­one’s day, you’re also going to be bor­ing some­one to tears, because there’s not 30 min­utes of things that involve every­body in the room. And again, unless there’s some incred­i­ble cri­sis, but even then the that’s not the intent of the meet­ing, it’s a pulse, mak­ing sure that we’re on track, mak­ing sure that we have what we need, mak­ing sure we don’t need to do some­thing impor­tant or sen­si­tive of the state to be able to be effective.

Brad Giles 13:45

So if we go back to the annu­al helps us to set strat­e­gy, the quar­ter­ly exe­cu­tion meet­ing helps us deter­mine the quar­ter­ly exe­cu­tion plan. And we spoke about that a cou­ple of episodes ago. And then we go to the month­ly, and then we go to the week­ly. And so in the week­ly, what we’re real­ly say­ing is, this is how I’m going to exe­cute this ¹⁄₁₃ of this quar­ter­ly plan, or this is where I’m at in terms of my quar­ter­ly progress. And so that’s what the that’s part of what the dai­ly hud­dle is also doing. It’s say­ing, am I like­ly to achieve? Or am I on track for this week’s plan? Because that’s a week’s plan is a part of the quar­ter­ly plan.

Kevin Lawrence 14:31

Yeah, so it’s basi­cal­ly mak­ing sure that I we have an effec­tive day and one of the ques­tions the third, for the fourth thing that we do the third thing we talk about in the agen­da is about mak­ing sure you have every­thing you need to have a suc­cess­ful day. And it’s crit­i­cal to make sure that you’re hav­ing a great day. So let’s jump in to the agen­da itself — it’s three ques­tions. And then some­times peo­ple will cus­tomize it and add some­thing else. And be Be care­ful about adding too much like a lot of things you can do. But the first thing is, it’s two words with a ques­tion mark. It’s what’s up? What’s up? What’s up? So and again, if you’ve got peo­ple their ideas, you ide­al­ly, you go around the room and hear from every per­son I call the dai­ly meet­ing, cir­cling three times, we cir­cle with Ques­tion one, we cir­cle with ques­tion two, and we go around the whole cir­cle for Ques­tion three, it’s an effi­cient way to do it. And for speed, and it also makes sure every­body par­tic­i­pates. Now, if you get into 50, peo­ple, if you have all hands, or every­one in the office 50 per­son meet­ing slight­ly dif­fer­ent. But for a team that this is, you know, the exec­u­tive team, or the mar­ket­ing team, or the account­ing team, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. What’s up? And basi­cal­ly, what’s up is what’s going on today, that we should all know about. Now, maybe it’s just some­thing excit­ing. You want to share. Maybe it’s you know, the queen is going to be tour­ing the office today. There’s a spe­cial new prod­uct get­ting launched, or who knows what, there’s a pow­er out­age, just what’s going on, that we need to be aware of in our day.

Brad Giles 16:23

And it’s not micro­manag­ing. This is a real trap app in the What­sApp sec­tion. Because yes, some peo­ple and be in a leader or a work­er, they might think that what’s up means, what am I work­ing on today? How am I you know, my boss is giving

Kevin Lawrence 16:39

Think of a brief­ing of a mil­i­tary to a mil­i­tary com­man­der with the team? What’s going on? What do we need to be aware of? That’s hap­pen­ing, right? So it’s real straight­for­ward. And there’s always now some com­pa­nies also the base ques­tion, what’s up? Some peo­ple will mod­i­fy this and say, you know, what’s up? Or what’s, uh, when some­thing good that’s hap­pen­ing? Yeah. Some com­pa­nies will do, you know, what’s, what’s up here and what’s up in your life. Like, they will bring a per­son­al com­po­nent in for bond­ing, and again, do what you want, but it’s a bring to the table, the impor­tant things that we should all be aware of.

Brad Giles 17:29

And there could be good and bad things. It’s not only you know, I remem­ber I worked with one team. And they were, they use the phrase ener­gy up. And so he had to only bring things that were pos­i­tive. And it’s like, maybe the house is burn­ing down. But you know, it’s good.

Brad Giles 17:57

Yeah. So it’s just what’s up broad­ly, what’s going on. And one of the keys is that it should be short and sharp, know­ing every team’s got a dif­fer­ent size. But know­ing that we’ve got to get through all of the peo­ple know­ing that no one wants to stand there lis­ten­ing to any­one for a long peri­od of time, make it short, sharp, suc­cinct, and look out for the peo­ple. I’m going to just say this, right, who might be a lit­tle bit low­er on the EQ scale, or might want to, let’s just say, give you a sta­tus update of every­thing so that they look good. Like, you got to give them bet­ter coaching.

Kevin Lawrence 18:41

It’s that’s the sin­gle most impor­tant thing that you need to share one, not a shop­ping list. Yep. Per­fect. All right. Speak­ing of being short and sharp, let’s go to the next one. The sec­ond is your dai­ly met­ric. Most com­pa­nies will have 345 met­rics or KPIs that if they pay atten­tion to it gives them a good pulse of the busi­ness. And this is about hav­ing dai­ly data so that you can make some adjust­ments. Or maybe you need to have a spe­cial meet­ing after the meet­ing, if some­thing’s either real­ly good, or real­ly bad. And you know, there’s a cou­ple dif­fer­ent ways peo­ple will do this. In some com­pa­nies, they go around the room for peo­ple that own one of those key met­rics. Some com­pa­nies get each per­son to report a met­ric. But gen­er­al­ly, a lot of com­pa­nies will have a white­board or a dig­i­tal white­board, where they have those top three to five num­bers. And then the own­ers, the own­er of those num­bers, each num­ber reports on it and tells us the update.

Brad Giles 19:41

And this is an easy one for teams to skip if they don’t have sophis­ti­cat­ed report­ing, but I would still encour­age you to use that time for some kind of dai­ly met­ric in some form. So that could be I mean, they might say for exam­ple, we get we close it up At the end of the month, and so then a few days after that, we’ll have some kind of num­bers to dis­cuss, well, you got to kind of look beyond that. Now, obvi­ous­ly, an easy one is sales, what were the sales num­bers for yes­ter­day should be pret­ty easy to track. And that might be great and easy for the sales team or sales per­son. But you can switch out num­bers each day. So maybe on Mon­day, you could talk about, you can have team mem­bers talk about one form of sales, a lead­ing indi­ca­tor or a lag­ging indi­ca­tor. And then in account­ing, you could have the five top key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors. And then on Mon­day, they report on one and then Tues­day a dif­fer­ent one. So he’s real­ly switched it up. It does­n’t need to be only talk­ing about my KPI because the first thing that many peo­ple say around the dai­ly met­ric is, yeah, but I only get my num­bers week­ly, or I only get my num­bers month­ly or some­thing like that. What do I say the oth­er four days, so find dif­fer­ent KPIs to try

Kevin Lawrence 20:57

And if you only get your num­bers month­ly, that’s finan­cials, there’s lots of oper­a­tional KPIs. And every busi­ness and big­ger busi­ness­es, this is eas­i­er, big­ger busi­ness­es, there’s a lot more data and a lot more mov­ing parts. But that exam­ple, Brad that you gave was a great one of okay, Mon­day’s report sales. Two, we report a day Tues­day report a cus­tomer feed­back, three, report, day three, report inven­to­ry. Day num­ber four, we report, cash con­ver­sion cycle. Yeah, and day num­ber five, we report meal pro­duc­tion and or pro­duc­tion of cus­tomers need­ed, or ship­ping of what cus­tomers need­ed, and what per­cent of what they need­ed divi­sion, what­ev­er it is. But so basi­cal­ly, you can report all the num­bers every day, if there’s enough going on in busi­ness, or you just report on a dif­fer­ent num­ber every day, the key is to stay con­nect­ed to the num­bers that are mean­ing­ful in the business.

Brad Giles 21:46

All of that is that the cus­tomer pays me is that the oth­er team mem­bers, they get edu­cat­ed on what mat­ters. So if we say we’re super, like, we’ve got real prob­lems, we’re real­ly red on this area. Every­one in the team learns every time you talk about the numbers.

Kevin Lawrence 22:07

And it also that every­one stays focused on what mat­ters because those key num­bers are what mat­ters. Yes. And so and it directs your atten­tion to that ver­sus maybe we need to get a new brand of cof­fee in the cof­fee machine, which maybe you still do. Okay, so agen­da point num­ber one, what’s up? Num­ber two is the dai­ly met­ric or met­rics? And then num­ber three, which is a lit­tle isn’t there’s dif­fer­ent ver­sions, but it’s basi­cal­ly where or are you stuck? Or anoth­er ver­sion is, you know, what do you need to make sure you have a pro­duc­tive day? Or what do you need assis­tance with? The ques­tion where you’re stuck is excel­lent. But some peo­ple have a psy­cho­log­i­cal block around it. Peo­ple don’t like to admit that they’re stuck. But the idea is, what’s some­thing that would be in your way for accom­plish­ing what you need to accom­plish today and hav­ing a pro­duc­tive day?

Brad Giles 23:05

Yes, yes. And there’s always some­thing I’ve, I’ve seen accounts payable and receiv­able, peo­ple who can some­times can push back against the dai­ly hud­dle, and I love them. Don’t get me wrong, but they’re like, ah, you know, there’s we’re not real­ly into the dai­ly hud­dle. We do the same thing all day every day. And it’s like, yeah, but where are you stuck? Like, what are the prob­lems? They go, Oh, well, Com­pa­ny X isn’t pay­ing their bills, or, you know, I’ve got? And so that’s an exam­ple where if they brought that up, some­body else who deals with Com­pa­ny X might be able to say, I know them real­ly well, I’ll give them a call. Yes, is it kind of things that can free up the bot­tle­necks where oth­er peo­ple, you just might not know that, and there’s no oth­er forum in which to do that?

Kevin Lawrence 23:56

Right. So there’s two things some­times things that you’re stuck on are things that you can fix your­self and just think­ing about it and artic­u­lat­ing it ben­e­fits you. Some­times that’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for a col­league to help you. For exam­ple, I worked with a large Auto Group, a mul­ti brand Auto Group in anoth­er coun­try. And I remem­ber that the CEO of that busi­ness, there was a sub­stan­tial busi­ness loved the dai­ly meet­ing. Once I got him to start doing it. He says one of the best things he ever did. And he gave me an exam­ple of one of the meet­ings, there’s the guy who ran a Jaguar brand, and it was say­ing we’re stuck. I got these four units, I can’t move. It’s last year’s mod­el. I need to move them the new ones are here this week, we got to do some­thing. And a guy on the oth­er side of the room who’s actu­al­ly respon­si­ble for doing buy those, you know what? I think I know some­body will take them some­one just asked me for some­thing. And I think this could fit the bill. So again, just in one meet­ing, they move for units that were stuck, like dead stock.

Brad Giles 24:59

You know, a real­ly cool take on the stock con­cept that I’ve seen before was I think it was Spo­ti­fy. At Spo­ti­fy, they work in small teams, let’s say of four or five peo­ple. And they work in clus­ters of work­sta­tions, and at each clus­ter, they had to white­board adja­cent and they always had to write where they were stuck on the white­board near­by. Yeah, so every­one always knew where each of the teams were stuck as they walked by, and all the team mem­bers knew what they were stuck on. It’s as much as it is impor­tant. For oth­er peo­ple to know that and poten­tial­ly fix it, it’s good for you to know, because it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for you to pri­or­i­tize that stuck item.

Kevin Lawrence 25:47

Because it burns up a lot of ener­gy when you’re stuck on any­thing to go lat­er­al, when you could be find­ing a way to go for­ward. Alright, let’s move on the next point, and there’s dif­fer­ent add ons peo­ple have done. I’ve seen peo­ple do joke of the day. You know, we’ve also we brought that we’ve seen oth­er peo­ple do word of the day, I’ve seen a one com­pa­ny where it was in the Mid­dle East, and they did the Ara­bic word of the day, every­one was Eng­lish speak­ers, there was one mem­ber on a team that spoke Ara­bic and or a coun­try that speaks Ara­bic. And so every­one was learn­ing a new Ara­bic word every day. So there’s tons of dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions or add ons, peo­ple have done a ball beyond those three questions,

Brad Giles 26:34

but don’t let it go past 10 — 12 minutes.

Kevin Lawrence 26:38

Exact­ly, which is the dan­ger of adding any­thing else. So we got three things. what’s up dai­ly met­ric, where you’re stuck of three things, and feel free to do oth­er things around it. But if you get away from those three, it just gets riskier.

Brad Giles 26:55

They’re all there for a rea­son, I’ve seen anoth­er one, which is the oppor­tu­ni­ty of the die. So any­one bring­ing any but you know, like what these things are designed to speed up the busi­ness to free up, as we said ear­li­er, about an hour a day, they’re designed to align the team bring every­one togeth­er into this reg­u­lar pulse. Also, they heal rela­tion­ships, they if you’ve got two team mem­bers that are there, who maybe had a bit of a con­flict or a bit of an issue, by virtue of the fact they’ve got to come togeth­er and share these three items, it can heal rela­tion­ships over time, in a way that you may not anticipate.

Kevin Lawrence 27:42

And it also cre­ates some psy­cho­log­i­cal safe­ty because you’re feel­ing tighter and emo­tion­al­ly con­nect­ed with these peo­ple. And it reminds you that your team and you feel more like a team by shar­ing, espe­cial­ly for shar­ing the stuff that’s going well and the stuff that’s not going well. And at the end of the day, we’re humans and we’re part of a tribe, right. And we like to be part of a tribe and it con­nects peo­ple in a way where things flow much more quick­ly. And if you want to speed up some­thing in your com­pa­ny, have a dai­ly meet­ing, the dai­ly meet­ing moves things quick­er, because of the rela­tion­ship and the trust. And all those oth­er ingre­di­ents just move things along. It’s very, very, very, very hard.

Brad Giles 28:25

I think it’s impor­tant to also make a note that the lead­ers should take a back­seat in the dai­ly hud­dle, they should be just a par­tic­i­pant, and you want to get some­one who’s very well orga­nized, is going to you know, yell out it’s time for the hud­dle, when the time pops up, is going to get peo­ple orga­nized. Like it’s the lead­ers role is par­tic­i­pant only in the dai­ly hud­dle. It’s not to be the organizer.

Kevin Lawrence 28:54

I think it’s very effec­tive when that hap­pens. And because that per­son it needs to be run, like you’re gonna dry and not and please like I’ve seen the Oh, every­one takes a turn run­ning the dai­ly hud­dle. That gen­er­al­ly isn’t a great thing. Run­ning meet­ings is a skill not not not some­thing that every­one gets, you could do that. It just know that it’s very dan­ger­ous, because a lot of peo­ple can’t run them well. And a week of poor­ly run meet­ings can become very, very painful.

Brad Giles 29:22

Yeah, I guess you know, a cou­ple of oth­er things is you want sta­tus, not solu­tions, because what always hap­pens in dai­ly hud­dle, some­one says, oh, look, you know, I have you thought about doing this, or have you tried that?

Brad Giles 29:51

It’s only status…

Kevin Lawrence 29:53

unless the build­ing is on fire. The Answer is Okay, excel­lent, Jack and Fed­eri­co, could you talk about that after­wards and come back and see me or bring it to tomor­row’s meet­ing you, you notice some­one’s going to deal with it, but it ain’t hap­pen­ing now. That’s either on their own time or after the meet­ing. So you don’t bore every­one else with the details. They just don’t need to know.

Brad Giles 30:23

Yeah, yeah. Because they don’t need to know it. They need to know the sta­tus. So think of it like a, you know, a ver­bal dash­board, if you will, of the team. And some­one needs to be account­able to tell peo­ple, okay, can you guys take it offline? Some­one needs to keep that flow path.

Kevin Lawrence 30:43

And that’s the per­son that dri­ves the media need to be good at, hey, can you do that offline? Hey, can you do that tomor­row? Hey, do you want to stay for a few min­utes after and pro­tect­ing it? So you stay to the 10 min­utes? Yeah, anoth­er cou­ple of key things too, is that stand­ing up, when you stand up, things hap­pen faster, spe­cial­ly if you’re in a meet­ing where you sit down in a chair, and you relax. And by the way, it’s also a great tech­nique to end a phone call. If you’re on a phone with a long talk­er, and they won’t, he can’t get off the phone, if you actu­al­ly stand up, it’s eas­i­er to end the call. Because it changes your ener­gy, your ener­gy, you actu­al­ly get more ener­getic when you stand. A cou­ple oth­er things is using a timer. Spe­cial when you get going, you need to use a timer and onto the timer. And if you’re aim­ing for 10 min­utes, you might set it for nine and then you got to buffer. When we run meet­ings and we’re tight on time the timers are mag­ic. And then the final thing is that the per­son lead­ing the meet­ing needs to be pre­pared. This is take a cou­ple min­utes to get them­selves orga­nized. And that’s a basic for meet­ings. But it applies to this one too.

Brad Giles 31:52

But it’s okay. For to your ear­li­er point. I think it’s okay to make a quick com­ment that peo­ple can dial in by phone or zoom as well to dai­ly hud­dle. Just because we work in a remote world. Nowa­days, there’s no rea­son that you can have dai­ly holes. I’ve got many teams that I work with that do dai­ly hud­dles at the same time. And it’s just a dial in meeting.

Kevin Lawrence 32:16

Yeah, peo­ple just dial in. Actu­al­ly, in many cas­es, it’s more effi­cient than even again, depends on your com­pa­ny and your struc­ture. Just to kind of wrap up, I’ll share a quote from a CEO worked with Van­cou­ver. His name was Roger Hardy. And he built a com­pa­ny called Kos­ta con­tacts. And when I inter­viewed him for the scal­ing up book, we talked about the hud­dles, and he said, you know, he said, Kevin, it’s like brush­ing my teeth. You know, it’s one of these things, if you know, I don’t real­ize how impor­tant it is until I miss a day. Yeah. And he said, For him, it was just a basic of how he run his busi­ness. He could be in sync with his exec­u­tive team who were in sync with their teams. And it just, it allowed him in 10 min­utes a day to do his job real­ly, real­ly well. And when he did­n’t do it, it he felt like he was dis­con­nect­ed from the busi­ness. It was a big, big gap.

Brad Giles 33:07

Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, do you want to move to wrap it up?

Kevin Lawrence 33:14

Let’s do that. So the idea here is that basi­cal­ly, it’s sev­en to 12 min­utes, ide­al­ly, under 10 min­utes is a good rule of thumb, leave your­self a lit­tle buffer there, to get every­one on track and focus for the day, and the whole team in sync with the intent of get­ting things to move along faster. Because we’re all in absolute har­mo­ny and walk­ing lock­step with each oth­er. Again, it’s not rock­et sci­ence, when things get weird. We intu­itive­ly think that we should have a dai­ly meet­ing to get things back on track. We’re just doing it prac­ti­cal­ly. And Brad, you want to roll through the agenda?

Brad Giles 33:50

So we begin it’s three ques­tions, make it sim­ple, make it short, make it a sta­tus update. So the first one is, what’s up two words, what’s up, sta­tus update for you, your role, your area, dai­ly met­ric, we spoke about the num­bers that you need to bring in how there’s dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions that you can do on that depend­ing on your role. And then where are you stuck, every­one gets stuck. If you’re not stuck, then you prob­a­bly might not be doing work. If you keep not get­ting stuck reg­u­lar­ly, until every­one gets stuck and unsure. You can get a leaf pass once in a while, but every­one gets stuck. So with that very sim­ple agen­da that kind of rounds out what we’ve got to do. There are oth­er things you can do in there. But you know, exer­cise cau­tion when you’re bring­ing things in because the absolute, the absolute is you’ve got to keep it under 10 to 12 min­utes. And so yeah, that’s kind of where we’re at. We went through those oth­er things. So with that, let’s move to close Kev. This has been the dai­ly hud­dle this round. At the meet­ing rhythm, the series that we’ve done over the past few weeks, again, and you will quar­ter­ly month­ly, week­ly, and then and then dai­ly. And this is the essence of real­ly a great exe­cu­tion foundation.

Kevin Lawrence 35:15

You can do this yeah. And in this case, you know, we’re look­ing at it’s 10 min­utes a day with your team to be in sync and focused and flush­ing out obsta­cles, week­ly 60 to 90 min­utes to focus and reset around the com­pa­ny goals. You’re try­ing to achieve that quar­ter, month­ly, a half a day to a day to dig deep­er on strat­e­gy, get in sync around some edu­ca­tion and become a more capa­ble team. Quar­ter­ly reset, review how you per­formed, reset your goals for the next 90 days. And then annu­al­ly, zoom out and look at the whole thing. Look at your strat­e­gy and all of your pieces of what you’re doing. And the dai­ly is that you know, that foun­da­tion­al piece that you’re going to do a cou­ple 100 times a year that helps you to be more suc­cess­ful. So thank you guys for lis­ten­ing today. This has been the growth whis­per­ers pod­cast with Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence. For the YouTube ver­sion or the video ver­sion, go to youtube​.com Look for the growth whis­pers and to sub­scribe to our newslet­ters indi­vid­u­al­ly, or con­tact either one of us you can reach Brad at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au and Kevin at Lawrence and co​.com. Have a won­der­ful week.