The daily huddle is a 15-minute meeting, at the same time every day, built on three questions. It's the shortest meeting in a scaling business, and it's the one that makes every other meeting shorter.
Verne Harnish lays out four meeting rhythms in Scaling Up. The daily huddle. The weekly meeting. The monthly management meeting. The quarterly and annual planning sessions.
Of the four, the most important isn't one of the big ones.
It's the huddle.
Why does a 15-minute meeting matter that much?
Because it moves information through the business fast and accurately, every day.
It brings out what's blocking execution before it turns into a train wreck. It saves everyone an hour of update emails and interruptions. And the issues it surfaces become the main topics for the weekly meeting.
The Ritz-Carlton gathers about 80 people at head office for a 10-minute daily huddle with updates from Boston to Bali, and every one of its 35,000 employees is in a huddle at their own hotel.
What are the three questions?
What's up? Each person, up to 30 seconds, on the key activities, meetings and decisions in the next 24 hours.
What are the daily metrics? The handful of numbers a CEO watches, read out loud, looking for patterns and trends.
Where are you stuck? The most important five minutes. The brutal facts, and the constraints that could stop someone having a great next 24 hours.
How do you run it well?
Start on time, whoever's missing. Stand up, because it keeps it short.
Pick an odd start time, like 8:08. People turn up for 8:08 in a way they don't for 8:00.
Plan a minute a person. An eight-person team gets an eight-minute huddle.
End on time, even if the agenda isn't finished. The team learns fast.
And when someone says "everything's fine" two days running, there's a bigger problem lurking. Ask again.
What should it never become?
A check on whether someone did yesterday's job. Looking forward is management. Looking backward is micromanagement.
The one thing to do this week
Book the huddle. Same time every weekday, 15 minutes, the three questions. Run it for two weeks before you judge it.
If you want help setting the rhythm for your leadership team, book a 25-minute Growth Plan call.
