Improve Accountability and Execution With a Daily Huddle

Daily Huddles are a great way to build teams and drive accountability and execution

Anyone who has a team in either remote offices or working from home should be spending time thinking about how everyone is doing with their To-Do lists. This is particularly true if your team members have similar responsibilities or manage groups of programs.

I once had a team that managed alumni-association credit card partners that had a lot of initiatives on their plates, so we didn’t always have their undivided attention.

I started a 20-minute Daily Huddle (first thing in the AM-if you couldn’t make it, no problem) and gave each person two minutes to list their biggest accomplishment of the previous day, what they wanted to accomplish that day, and what they needed from me or someone else on the call. I kept track of what each person wanted to accomplish and asked the next day (and for a number of days after, if need be) about the barriers to completing that task.  

One benefit of the daily call was that other team members often offered advice based on their experience with a similar problem with another school and very often someone would volunteer to role-play or help in some way to get the goal accomplished. In addition, having to outline your goals in front of others led to more tangible goals that would have a real impact on the team’s results…and improvement in their presentation skills given the time we gave them.

As a result of this and some other execution-focused initiatives, we renewed 100+ relationships (with no losses), protecting $250 million in revenues, significantly reducing the sponsorship fees we were paying, and increasing group-satisfaction scores by 20%.  We also surpassed our goals for launching our Affinity Checking product by 200% (endorsements and accounts).  All because we spent a little bit of time every day focusing on initiatives that would move the needle.

I was telling someone about this initiative and she observed that people probably worked harder to complete tasks and come up with good objectives for the day because they didn’t want theirs to pale by comparison to other team members.  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s probably true.

To be effective: Keep it short. Keep it focused. And try to have it at the same time every day — first thing in the AM.

How do you help your teams — or yourself — be more accountable and execute more effectively.  Please share!