Huddle Up: The Value of Morning Stand-up Meetings

Every good football team knows the value of a huddle; it’s the catalyst for executing the next play.

Unless they’re running a two-minute drill, the offense huddles around the quarterback, who communicates every nuance of the play – from the blocking assignments to the hole the running back will hit or the routes the receivers will run.

After the huddle, comes the execution. The quarterback might see a defensive look that causes him to audible to a different play, or he might motion to his receiver, who will adjust his route so the pass hits him in stride.

Businesses can learn all kinds of things from the huddle. I’m going to describe the development of the morning huddle concept and share what Element Three employees have been learning in recent weeks as we’ve adjusted to our own daily stand-ups.

Huddle up, people.

The idea of the morning business huddle is nothing new but it seems to be gaining in popularity.

A 2007 Inc. magazine article called “The Art of the Huddle” describes how a variety of businesses each instituted their own version of a huddle, including:

• a California manufacturing company,
• a New Jersey nurse staffing agency,
• a Virginia consulting firm,
• a Canadian junk removal franchisor, and
• a New York facilities management company

So whether you’re consulting or hauling junk, you might want to try out this huddle thing. You might call it “roll call,” “daily scrum,” or our personal favorite, the “stand-up,” but regardless of the name, the brief meetings aim to open up the lines of communication and allow teams to make rapid adjustments as projects and priorities change.

What will you write today? (It better be good.)

My introduction to the morning huddle started at a pair of central Indiana newspapers. Each morning, the reporters and editors would gather to discuss the day’s news coverage and plan for the week ahead. We’d go around the room with each reporter, in turn, describing what we planned to report on and write that day.

Bring bad ideas – or worse yet, no ideas – to the table and your miffed editor would send you off to shake the bushes in search of a better idea. Or worse yet, he’d hand you a boring assignment you most definitely didn’t want to write.

So I learned the value of developing and working my sources, of always knowing what stories might be around the bend – and most importantly of communicating with my colleagues so that we could fill the paper with the best possible news stories.

When a reporter made the most compelling argument (or had a major story fall in their lap), they’d be writing the “centerpiece” story for the following day and get the help of the staff photographer. That’s unless there was a breaking story that trumped what we planned; in such cases, you learn to adapt to a changing situation in real time.

The Lightning and the Enlightening

Now I’m experiencing a new spin on the huddle. Element Three has grown rapidly in recent years and all fast-growing businesses know that fast growth brings its share of challenges. One of those challenges can involve communication as you add new team members and take on larger clients that require more complex marketing campaigns.

We recently instituted a daily huddle for our client teams and weekly tactical meeting for our Account, Digital, Web, and Creative departments as part of an effort to align communications across the company, maximize collaboration across teams, and become more efficient in shifting resources according to people’s capacity.

A morning huddle is a 15-minute standup meeting that starts with a “lightning round” where we each spend about 30 seconds talking about our work for the day. Hearing each team member touch on the projects they’re working on and their general capacity level helps the team identify who might need help and who might have the time to provide that help. We also indicate our level of awareness about company goals and hear updates on new company developments.

Once a week, we have a department Tactical Meeting that covers lessons, challenges, and opportunities facing the entire company. During this meeting, we share takeaways from the work we’re doing within each of our client teams, providing us with an opportunity to learn from each other’s mistakes and successes.

We’re just a few weeks in, but the regular meetings appear to be improving the flow of internal communication while giving us an opportunity to bring up our personal challenges or ask questions.

So what lessons have your company learned about internal communication? Have you ever held morning huddles? What’s your reaction to the morning huddle if it’s a new concept to you? Tweet them to me at @derekrsmith74 or email them to [email protected].