Milan: [00:00:00] Yeah. Because the, the whole point is how c players hate its guts, right? The, how it shines, the accountability light on everybody, how it’s basically eliminates the places to hide because, you know. Before daily huddle, you have to excuse yourself once a week. Now you have to come up with a new excuse every day.
It becomes really freaking hard, right? So really there is nowhere to hide. Right? So that was the. Element of the card, but the huddle obviously has many other functions. So I think that we can banter on that. Like, you know, what else is huddle good for? You know, it’s such a small tool. It’s seven minutes of your time a day, you know, what are the pitfalls?
Why is it hard to implement? You know, what, what stories do we have? And, you know, what, what happens after three weeks when you get into, into that habit?
Ged: Well, why don’t we do the introduction just around [00:01:00] that. I’ll sort of, you know, talk through and do the introduction to the, to the, to the shuffle and talk about the name of the card. And, and then, because it’s a new one, I can say it’s a new one, you know, so, you know why, why I can almost. Pretend that I don’t know this card.
Well, I don’t actually, so I’m not pretending at all. So we can actually just go in and I can say, why, why, why is this card called the Evil of the Daily Huddle? ’cause we know they’re great, don’t we? Yeah.
Milan: Yep.
Ged: Okay, so I’ll that, so I’ll leave it off as a, as a question to you about why daily huddles could be seen as evil.
Why? And then going back into that C play thing is perfect.
Milan: Why don’t you, why don’t we do it this way? So you do the intro shuffle, I will say the evil of a daily hover and you just interrupt me. Just jump in and say, why the hell is that? Evil Daily huddles are awesome, right? And of if we go to it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.[00:02:00]
Ged: Welcome back to Card Cast, the podcast where we pick one topic at random from a deck of cards that Milan has created over the last few years. Shuffle the deck, see which card pops out, and then we talk about it for about 10 to 15 minutes, and invariably there’s at least one nugget of gold that drops out. Let’s shuffle the deck.
Milan: Oh, the evil of daily huddle. Love that one.
Ged: This, this is a new card. Is it? Is it not? Milan? Is this why, why, why this? I’ve not, I don’t think I’ve seen this card. Why? Why the evil of the daily huddle? Why? Why the evil?
Milan: Well have you ever, I’m sure you have, it’s a rhetorical question, if there ever was one, you know, ran into a resistance trying to implement this in theory, in any organization, any of your clients or anything you’ve done before then, right? I remember that as a CEO. Like everybody was like, what the hell are you talking about?
[00:03:00] Like, we are going to meet every day, right? What, what? So. We are already meeting. We are already talking every day. Like all of those excuses why not to do it. But really the real evil of this is the accountability element,
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Right?
Ged: I see where you’re coming from. Yep. Yep.
Milan: Yeah. Yeah. You see players love to hide, right? And if you see your.
Supervisor, for lack of a better word, your leader once every couple of weeks. It’s relatively easy to come up with excuses why nothing got done right. Or you can hide, you can spread over it. But when you have that little check-in every day, it becomes quite a cognitive float to be coming a bit a new excuses, right?
Or people start falling into the same patterns basically. And the illustration of the card show is that, you know, that’s really. Shines the light on what is happening in the team provides the clarity, provides the you know, the, [00:04:00] the truth has, has nowhere to hide at that point. The accountability grows very, very quickly.
So people who have a ingrained aversion to accountability are always, always the first detractors to daily huddle, hence the evil of it for them. Otherwise it’s, you know, we know it’s great. We know it’s basically an essential tool in in our execution rhythm, right.
Ged: And, and, and when you’re talking about the accountability, you’re talking specifically about accountability for the metrics, or is it broader than that in your mind?
Milan: Oh, it’s absolutely broader. It’s about you know, a a friend of mine is talking about the say, do ratio as a metric. Meaning say what you do and then do what you say, right?
Ged: Yep.
Milan: What is the, you know, and, and what is the mechanism? And this is what happens because on, on the huddle, one of the main, one of the, one of the [00:05:00] agenda items is the most important thing I’m going to accomplish today.
Ged: Yep. Mm-hmm.
Milan: And if you don’t do it and then you don’t do it again,
Ged: Yep.
Milan: Then you don’t do it again, right then, at least the question, was it really important or did you come up with a, you know, how, how you can start looking at how is the thing that you’re going to do today going to help us achieve our weekly goal, our quarterly goal, our annual goal, right?
Is it heading in the direction? Again, that visibility just changes everything.
Ged: Yeah, and if there are any viewers or listeners out there that don’t know what a daily huddle is, it’s basically a seven to 15 minute meeting done normally at the beginning of every day with the leadership team, although often cascaded down over time and the agenda’s really simple. You share some good news. You review the key metrics that tell you how your business is operating on that day. You each talk about your number one priority for the day, so [00:06:00] the most important thing you have to get done, achieved, signed off, closed today, and then any blockers or stocks that are getting in your way. So it’s a very, very simple, straightforward agenda. And you should be able to get through it between seven and 15 minutes, depending on how big your leadership team is. But the fact that we’re doing every day is basically, ma is basically putting people on the spot, making them talk to how they are performing, talk, talk to how their function is operating. So as, as Milan mentioned, sea players hate it because they’re getting exposed every single day. And. You might think, well, that’s a bit harsh. But ultimately, you know, we, we are trying to build a, a leadership team of A players now. And if people keep on missing their targets or if people keep on not doing what they say they’re gonna do, we’ve got a problem.
And this is a really good way of shining the lights on non A player behavior.[00:07:00]
Milan: Yeah, we are really going to get it from the negative angle, aren’t we? Can we talk about the good of daily huddle for a second, right?
Ged: Before we put
Milan: Let, yeah, exactly. So look, the main thing is that is the best investment of time you can make in your day because the return on that investment is massive because of the stuck area.
Right. So you get together with your team in the morning and somebody says, I am stuck on this and I need help with that. Right? You don’t solve it right there and then, but you set up time to solve it because if you don’t have the huddle, what’s going to happen? That person, let’s say you are the solution or you are the one who can help, right?
So what’s gonna happen sometimes during the day, they will realize that they have that stuck. Right, and they will email you, send you a Slack message, text you, God forbid, call you, you know, whatever it is, completely interrupt your flow. And now depending on the dynamics and what you are at, [00:08:00] you know, either you stop doing what you’re doing to help them right, or they get stuck there and wait for your response for some time.
Right. Maybe they’ll start working on something else. Then you finally text them or email them. Now imagine that you’re the CEO and then your leadership team, when they get a message from the CEO, what they’re going to do, they’re going to drop everything and so on and so on. And then maybe finally you agree on taking a 30 minute of conversation, whatever that happens.
Huddle is so much more effective way of doing it. Plus, for the leader, you know what everybody else is up to that day. Right, so you might bring only the relevant conversations to them. If anything, you don’t need to check on everybody and say, Hey, how is it going? No, because the huddle has already done that, right?
You can also say, Hey, if you have this problem, why didn’t you bring it up on huddle? It becomes a really foundational piece of your [00:09:00] defendable calendar. See we have time for this type of communication. That’s those seven minutes at 8 43 every morning. Right? It’s actually not a bad idea to have that huddle under a really odd time and you don’t want it at nine because at nine people want to have customer calls or whatever that is.
Right? So you want to put it kinda off a bit?. So you know that you do that, everybody prepares for it. So everybody’s in the right set of mind. It goes very, very quick, and everybody goes away to their job with a completely different level of situational awareness of what is happening in the company as a whole.
Ged: Yeah. Because daily huddles are about synchronization. But it’s not synchronization one to one. It’s synchronization. Many to many. The whole leadership team knows what’s good has happened over the past 24, 48 hours. You know they know exactly how the company is operating from the numbers. Now and they know what people are gonna [00:10:00] focus on today. But one of the things I often throw in in once I’ve been working with a new client for about six to eight weeks is when we come to the metrics, if I’m sort of in a observing a huddle, I’ll ask the head of people and culture what the sales number is. And the reaction I always get is, well, I’m the head of people and culture.
I don’t know what the sales number is. Okay, what was it yesterday? I say, I don’t know. Okay. So was it on track or was it off track? I think it was off track. I said as a member of the leadership team, don’t you think you should know that there is a key part of the business that is not operating as it should be? I don’t always focus on the head of people and culture. I do mix it around a bit, but it’s a really good way of reinforcing that they’re there not to represent their function. They’re there to represent the whole leadership team together.
Milan: I don’t want to mislead our dear listeners here. Because, you know, you are talking about a [00:11:00] huddle, about a leadership huddle, but this happens on every level of the organization once we are done with it, right? Like,
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Like if we, if we are ever done. But the point is that you might have a sales team huddle,
Ged: Yep.
Milan: Right?
Again, what, what are their most important metrics? What, because every leader is CEO of their own organization. So the, the cascading system dictates that we operate the same on those levels as we do on the leadership. The leadership only sets the context and sets the rhythm that then propagates through the rest of the organization.
And actually, the funny thing is that even though we propagated down, the whole principle is actually to allow for the information to flow up. Right. That’s why the team huddles usually happen before the leadership huddle, right? Because that means that that leader who has been in that, in that team huddle, is now completely prepared to go to the leadership because he knows, or they know what the [00:12:00] stacks are on that level in their team.
So if it needs to be escalated, they have the perfect place to do that. And it just, it’s a magic. It’s ridiculous how, how well it works once implemented.
Ged: Yeah. I love that approach and I see that there’s often a point of inflection. No. When I first start working with teams and we start propagating the, the huddles down, then the first instinct is to have the leadership team huddle first, and then the next one, and then the next one, the next one. And after a while they realize that the information’s going the wrong way. And then they say, ah, okay, right. We need to switch this around, don’t we? Yeah. And they normally work it out for themselves, but it can take a good couple of months once it starts propagating
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: But that’s okay. ’cause they’ve, they that as coaches, we are there to the right questions to get the outcome that they need for themselves.
Milan: Mm-hmm. You know, one [00:13:00] very interesting huddle mechanism I’ve seen before. So generally I don’t, I don’t have a. Prescription for the teams be because the whole point is, as long as the lower level huddle happens before the higher level huddle, I’m happy. Right? So the information can flow in the right direction.. Sometimes all the team huddles happen at the same time, and then everybody just moves into leadership huddle. But I had this experience at our friends Carl Saunders company when he was a CEO at WarRoom. He, he invited me to a day to spend at the company there, which was very, very generous of him.
And I was sitting through his huddles. He had it set up very, very interestingly, so he had, I think, four team huddles and then the leadership huddle, and they would all happen in his office while he’s sitting at a desk. Right. So the, the, you know, the sales guys would show up and [00:14:00] have a conversation in the corner of his office, and then they would leave, and then the production would come and they would leave, and then the customer service would come and they would leave, and then all the leaders would come back and have a huddle with him.
So, so. You know, he had such a great finger on a pulse of the company thanks to it. I think that there was an agreement that he never speaks unless it’s the leadership huddle, right. It just was happening in his office and he just, you know, was just doing his thing there, just listening. And that was, that was perfectly fine. It was an interesting thing. I have not implemented the same thing with any client since, but it seemed to work really, really well for him at the time.
Ged: I like that. I like that. How, how’d you deal and we’re sort of going onto broader topics about daily huddles now, but I think that’s, that’s okay. How’d you deal with today’s very hybrid world where you have some people in, in person and some people often on the other side of the, of the, of the world?
Milan: I don’t think it’s off [00:15:00] topic at all. Right. Because we are dealing with time zones, we’re dealing with distributed distributed teams. So those are two different things. Like if we have distributed team, but in compat mutually compatible time zones, we still do the huddle. We just do it over video.
Great. If any we get recordings, we get transcripts. It’s actually, actually even more beneficial that way, quite easily. Again, depending on the setup of the organization. So absolutely. Distribution of the team. Absolutely. No excuse whatsoever. Time zones, on the other hand, that gets a little bit tough.
Right. So I have a client that they have one key member of their team, literally on the other side of the world. So they can somehow arrange themselves reasonably well, maybe twice a week, right? So they’re doing that. And then on the off days, they do like a offline huddle where again, all the topics are put in, in a Slack channel and off it goes.
Again, not [00:16:00] my preferred option. Because it’s definitely less effective, however, is the next best thing. And again, the time zones are the only excuse so to speak, that I personally let my clients get away with from a, having an in-person life huddle.
Ged: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I have one client that’s, they have a presence here, a presence in in, in Europe. And for most of the year that is about a 12 hour time difference. So they actually have two huddles every day. Now the first huddle is basically a handover from Europe to Australia at the end of the European day. And at the end of the Australian day, they then have another huddle, which is the handover to the European team. ’cause they have a follow the sun model. So it allows them to keep both teams synchronized with what’s going on around the world.[00:17:00]
Milan: 12 hour shift isn’t there, like 24?
Ged: No, they, they, they’re there. They’re there. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Mm-hmm.. I had a client I was working with, and we had a team in Europe, in Midwest, in Chicago and in Sydney. Right. So, yeah, that was a, yeah, that was a bit of yeah. A very, very unkind word is coming through my head. It was, it was a cluster something, but,
Ged: Got it. Got it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.
Milan: But you do have to yeah.
Ged: No, no. Sorry. You, you keep going. You keep going.
Milan: No, no, no, no. Like, but, but you have, you have to find a way, right? I think that what is, what is an issue is just make sure it’s fulfilling the purpose, right? Don’t worry about the technique as much worry about the context and while we are doing it, because sometimes, like, why [00:18:00] don’t we just put a message in in Slack?
Well, is that going to create the same accountability? Principle that you’re trying to get in, is it going to create the same level of situational awareness that you’re trying to create? Right? And then, yes, you can use these technology pieces to make that happen. You know, off time offline, you know, you know, all of those things.
But the cost. In terms of the opportunity, cost of not doing it in person is, is pretty high in my experience. Takes longer to get into the habit, takes longer to get the, get that effect takes longer to frankly, sometimes we, without the people from the team that should be there in the first place.
Ged: Yeah. So this card was called The Evil of Daily Huddle. And they’re not evil at all. In fact, it’s probably the the one thing that is gonna really [00:19:00] move the needle as you come to implement a growth operating system in your business. But there’s a few things that you can think about to actually make implementing daily huddles a lot easier. So, as Milan mentioned earlier. Always start them at an odd time. Now, I have clients that start their daily huddle at eight 18, so they’re finished for eight 30 so they can get on with their day. That starts at eight 30. I’ve got another client that starts their huddle at quarter to 11. They’ve got an they’ve got an operational unit in the Philippines, which is three hours behind, so that gives them an opportunity to take part in the daily huddle as well. Always, always, always finish on time. If, if you haven’t gone through the agenda, then someone has taken up too much time and let the peer pressure weed that behavior out, have someone keeping time, and then once you get to about three minutes from the end, just every minute. Count down the time and when the time’s up you leave. Yep. [00:20:00] Always stand. Have you ever noticed how long it takes a group of people to sit down in a meeting room? So don’t sit down? Yeah. It takes about three, four minutes for people to sit down when they all enter a meeting room. So do it in a huddle, a standing huddle door. Yeah. The
Milan: Don’t need a meeting room.
Ged: Absolutely in the hallway, in the lunchroom, wherever.
Yeah, somewhere where the whole team can see it’s happening. Because once they start, once the rest of the company starts seeing it happening, they’ll want to start copying that as it moves down through the organization. So huddles are not evil at all, and in my experience, if you give it 28 days, you’ll move people from being skeptics to supporters with one exception. But within 28 days they’ll be gone anyway.
Milan: Most likely. Yeah. Well, and I would add one more piece. If you as a CEO [00:21:00] are not willing to do daily huddles, don’t call a Metronomics coach because they won’t to work with you.
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: This is an absolutely essential element of our both accountability and therefore is a big piece of the human system. And then of course, the the execution system.
Okay.
Ged: Wrap.
