Strategic Discipline Blog

If doing something once a day is good for business, does doing it twice double the impact? 

Daily Huddles are to improve communication and accountability.  If you’ve not made them a part of your leadership and business disciplines you really should.  They’re a best practice!

This past week in meeting with one of my customers we discussed returning his focus to improving the quality of his people.  Due to some challenges he had found himself immersed in the day to day operations of his business.  Some of the best practices he had developed had fallen to the wayside as he hired new staff and gotten strangled by these challenges.  One of his best practices is “numbers that make sense.”  It includes a Friday weekly meeting where his team reviews their progress for the week.  He’s recently reinstituted another daily routine with this “numbers that make sense” following the daily huddle agenda where each member provides their metrics/objective for the day.  They have an early morning meeting where they announce their intentions, and then another at the end of the day where they provide whether they achieved their intention or not.

I’d call it a Daily Double. Two Daily Huddles instead of one.  The result of this practice elevates accountability two notches.  His people are being called on to submit their priorities for the day and what they expect to achieve.  At the end of the day they are immediately required to spell out how they did on both. 

The result for my customer is to discover that his team is woefully short in some areas which may require what Verne Harnish refers to as “freeing up your future” decisions. More on how my customer goes about that in a future blog.

When I first started coaching the Rockefeller Habits one best practice example we frequently shared was Goldman Sachs twice daily huddles.  In the fast paced world of investment banking, securities, investment management and financial services, things don’t change daily they change by the hour and sometimes by the minute.  Their firm had a practice of having two daily huddles.  One huddle was before trading started the other when trading ended at the end of the day.  With the dot com crash and the negativity of practices on Wall Street we moved away from mentioning this as a best practice. 

This shouldn’t diminish the value of two huddles a day in your business, particularly if you have a fast paced change oriented environment.  It’s also particularly valuable if your instituting new practices or if you simply wish to demand more accountability.  The huddle quickly reveals who’s achieving their priorities, meeting their metrics, and finally if you’re using the daily huddle agenda we recommend, divulging who’s getting stuck and who isn’t.  (Anyone who doesn’t get stuck occasionally is suspect to not getting much accomplished or challenging themselves.)

The twice daily “numbers that make sense” practice for my customer exposed the need for people change.  He discovered one of his processes required current computer skills that his present staff is either unwilling or unable to perform at the standard he needs.  Faced with a choice of dummying down his system he feels it makes sense to upgrade the quality of his staff. 

Does a double dose of daily huddles make sense for your business?  If you’re struggling with accountability it may be precisely what you should consider.  It might be you simply need to require it for a short period of time to ensure your team is preforming to a higher standard.

The practice of Strategic Discipline raises everyone’s performance.  Clarity of priorities, metrics to measure progress, and meeting rhythms that provide a cadence of accountability get your team moving in the same direction.

The most effective measure of leadership is the performance of your team in your absence.  Your team performs at a higher level with the three disciplines of priorities, meetings and metrics in place.  The disciplines put your team on automatic pilot – these best practices remain in place even when you are absent.

Want to learn how to align your team and establish these best practices?  Would your business like to learn the important disciplines that great companies use to achieve success? Download the Mastering the Rockefeller Habits Four Decision Workshop Flyer and Register to attend the workshop on April 29^th in Cedar Rapids, IA.

The book Switch by Dan and Chip Heath indicates that Negativity is more powerful than being positive.  How do you combat this affect and prevent you and your team from falling prey to negativity in the workplace.  Will discuss why discipline is so powerful in breaking this spell next blog.