In Defense Of The Daily Huddle

Your position as a CEO includes the responsibilities of creating pace, that drives your team forward, connection so that they work together and understand each other, and recognition so that they know what they're doing right.

The absolute best way to do this on a daily basis in-person is in a daily huddle. I've helped dozens of entrepreneurs go from six to seven figures and from seven to eight, probably more than dozens. We're probably into the hundreds now, and the daily huddle is one of the most important tools they use.

Do not skip this. I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast. Made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world-makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off, and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy. We are obsessed with creating momentum, so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution.

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So this podcast isn't just to advocate for a daily huddle for you and your team. This is also to defend a real daily huddle for you and your team. Because something came up this week, that I want to share and advocate against. I'm part of a really awesome Facebook group called The Replaceable Founder. With Ari Meisel. Ari and I have been friends for years. He's one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs out there. When it comes to doing more with less time and more with less resources, Ari shows entrepreneurs like me and you exactly how to do that.

In his group, another friend of mine, who shall remain nameless for now, actually made a post that said, "What is the best standup/Huddlebot for Slack?" And I saw Huddlebot. Huddlebot? I didn't understand. What's a Huddlebot? So I posted the question, what is a standup/Huddlebot? The answer that I got was it's what dudes like me do when we don't have your cadence in place, or it's a daily standup meeting for remote teams done in Slack.

When I read that it was like a punch in the face. So what we're doing is we're taking the discipline of a daily standup, which is getting together with your team. Creating pace, sharing results, driving connection, letting people recognize each other. We're taking it to the completely impersonal and dead platform called Slack, which if anybody's been ever been on Slack, you know it's a constant irritation anyway. Nobody has ever gotten excited about opening Slack and looking at all the little messages that they have. It's actually frustrating.

So my reply to that was, "That sounds like it would suck." The daily huddle's a place for connection, team building, giving people accolade, and creating a team atmosphere. Slack is cold, confusing, sometimes overwhelming, and does anything but create human connection. This may sound like a shortcut, but I think it's going to cost you in the long run. I absolutely believe that.

See, I think here's what's happening. This discipline called the daily huddle is being overlooked by entrepreneurs who thinks that somehow it's going to modify their lives too much. Well, they can't stand the thought of checking in every day with their team. Or getting on a live Zoom call where everybody gets to see each other. But the reality is, is this is one of the most important tools you will ever have in your business. In fact, I coach entrepreneurs around the world to add daily huddles to their businesses and admittedly, near probably 70, 80% fight me on it.

They say things like, "Why would we have the same meeting over and over again every day? Why would people who aren't really involved in revenue want to come to a meeting where we share numbers? Why would a team want to be on a daily huddle?" Those are the questions I get. Then three or four months later, after they've started, I hear things like, "I just got off my daily huddle and it was so awesome." Or, "I can't understand what we did before we had a daily huddle." Or, "Now that I've added the daily huddle, it's incredible how fast my team is growing." Let me make the argument for a daily huddle and the argument against doing something as silly and as lazy and as disconnected as running your huddle through an asynchronous communication app, where you're not all together and live and present at the same time.

Let's just be real. That, it's a joke. It's not going to have this same effect. You're fooling yourself if you think you're actually having a huddle and you're taking away most of the benefits of the huddle. Let me help you understand what I mean by that.

So first, the huddle drives pace. Here's what drives pace in an organization. How frequently has everybody in the organization communicated the results that you're currently getting at the same time, so everyone understands the scoreboard and knows what's happening? Well, in the companies I coach and run, that's daily. Every single day in our daily huddle we sign in, and in my company, Justin Hester welcomes everybody. He cracks open our metrics and he starts going through all the numbers we need to know. We see our critical number. We see our revenue. We see how many leads we brought in. We see how many sales we got. We see what our annual run rate is.

I mean, I'm doing it off the top of my head because I'm programmed to check in every day, look at my huddle and see exactly where our company stands. Here's what's amazing about driving that pace, every single person in my business sees the same thing. I watch on the huddle, when we sign in and we had a big sale the day before, everybody gets excited. This morning we were signing in and looking at the results from the CapCon event that I just went and spoke at, we got a ton of leads from that event. Our team was celebrating.

So driving pace around results is a game changer on your team. I don't like to miss a daily huddle. In fact, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I'm speaking at our event in town. So during our daily huddle, I'll actually be in front of the room. At the end of the day when I get home, I'll pull up the recording of the daily huddle and watch it because it drives pace for me. It gives me massive awareness, and I love connecting with my team.

The second thing that a huddle does besides just pace, is it creates connection. Whether you have an in-person team or you're like the majority of clients that I have and you have a remote team, we work with both but we work with a lot of remote. Here's what can happen on an remote team. If you're all in different places, and you're in a different place and the team's all over the place, you can go a week or two without everybody getting together and seeing each other. In fact, if you're on a remote team without a daily huddle, you might only all connect on your monthly meetings. Or all connect in some other way.

When you bring it together on a daily huddle and everyone can connect at the same time, you actually create human connection that creates a team. That is so crucial because, in so many different companies, we don't create human connection. The statistics around human connection in a company are undeniable. If a person has one friend in your company, one person that they connect to, one person that they relate to in the business, they're 75% less likely to quit. 75%. This isn't just about employer and team productivity. This is about human connection and momentum and letting people feel like they're a team.

There's a reason why before a football team goes on a field they have a huddle. There's a reason why before every place they have a huddle. There's a reason why when people on a team, they get together in a ritual, they see each other, they talk about their accomplishments, and it creates human connection. When people are interconnected to each other, they feel a greater responsibility to each other. When your team's seeing each other every day on a huddle, it's human beings that they're letting down if they don't do their work.

When your team is seeing each other every day on a huddle and hearing about what other people are doing, every person on your team will give you more of their discretionary effort and time. Because they feel the responsibility to each other, not to you. You want that lateral pressure, where your team wants to perform for each other. Not that downward pressure, where they're performing for you as the CEO. Your huddle is going to help drive this like crazy. If you've never done it, you can't understand just how transformational it is to have a huddle where people actually sign in, care about it, listen, and see each other and create human connection.

Think about that. Right now your team has a responsibility to the work they do. You create a huddle where they get to know each other, they understand each other, they joke a little each day, they talk about each other, they see what's happening. They then have an even greater responsibility to each other. That will serve you as a CEO to grow your business more than just about anything else. We want that discretionary time. We want a higher level of commitment from your team. We want them to be excited about what they're doing every day. So having a huddle will supplement the energy they're already giving you. It will supplement the commitment that they already have.

Then the third reason we have a huddle is we want a place where we can give accolade, where we can recognize our team. My team does insane stuff for us all the time, like crazy. Let me give you an example. Last week, I was going to this CapCon event yesterday, we figured out due to 100% my fault, nobody on my team. I had to put together a project to actually have a funnel and a download and a way to capture leads at the event, so I had to give my team a high alert last week. Not only did they pull it together, the funnel that we put together for CapCon is beautiful. In fact, I probably shouldn't share it here because it's a little confusing but whatever. You got to check it out. It's billionairecode.com/capcon. And my team did it in less than a week. They crushed it.

Corina did the graphics, Rachel did the writing, Haley helped project manage, Melanie made the technology, and Justin made the technology all work. And Chris Bennetti, who's one of our contractors and helped us with the funnel. It looked absolutely amazing. So in our huddle, we're giving recognition and accolade. I'm telling people, "Thank you." I'm saying, "You crushed it."

We have a section called who got caught being awesome, and here's what I do during that section every day. I sit back and I watch my team aggressively compliment each other and give each other accolade and make each other feel accomplished and make each other feel like they did something and letting each other know how important they are to each other. You can't do that in Slack, and if you do, who cares? It's Slack. It's like getting a bunch of text messages. Nobody's really checking it.

So when it comes to doing a huddle for your team, I want you to know something. Especially to the person who asked the question in the group, and you know who you are, about what's the best standup Huddlebot for Slack? Here's what I want you to know, you can't take a shortcut here. It's not going to work. There is no app that is going to replace an in-person huddle to drive pace, create connection, and allow your team to have recognition with each other.

There is no app that is going to replace the genuine human connection of signing into a Zoom call or showing up to a room in-person, if you're an in-person company, and seeing everyone and laughing with everyone. And watching what people are wearing that day. And understanding that the business that you're working in isn't just a collection of processes that everyone's doing. The business in your work that you're working in is full of incredible human beings.

When it comes to awesome companies, awesome companies are just a group of incredible people who all decided to work in the same place. When you let them see each other and connect with each other and work with each other, and you encourage the connection on the huddle and you get your team to recognize each other and you all see metrics moving forward on a daily basis, everything in your business will go faster. Your team will be more engaged. They'll be more excited to work with you.

And on a daily basis, they will feel that connection to the greater accomplishments they're making together. Because you don't want your team to be a bunch of independent players. What you want is your team to be connected, working together, and using everyone's collective knowledge and work and effort, so that there is exponentially more productivity out of your business. The huddle will help you do this.

So this is one place where shortcuts are silly. The fact that there's now bots, and let's just examine how ridiculous this new standup bot thing is. A couple of them are quotes, there's one called Standuply and another one called Geekbot or something. Let's just look at what we're saying here. Instead of doing a real huddle, where you sign in to Zoom and everybody sees each other, we're all going to show up remotely at the same time and stare at Slack. Then we're going to sit there and watch messages come through Slack. Those messages coming through Slack are going to create genuine human connection, pace, and recognition. I've got news for you. That's a pipe dream.

You know that commercial a few years ago where they would bring something up and then say, "Oh, there's an app for that?" Well, I realize there's an app for that, but maybe there shouldn't be. Not everything in the world should be relegated to an app. When it comes to human connection and moving your team forward and creating momentum for you, this is something that you should be doing in-person. This is something you should be doing with your team. Take the 10 or 15 minutes into each day, put a huddle together, and before long, it's going to be the most important 10 or 15 minutes of your day, every day, and it will be for your team as well.

If you're ready to create an entirely different way of running a business, if you want not just a huddle but the entire cadence system that drives the numbers you share in the huddle, the way that you enter every targeted interaction you have with your team, how you strategically plan and then communicate that plan to your team so that you achieve more, reach out to us. Go to billionairecode.com/apply. Let's show you proven systems and a structure that will help you scale your business fast. do so without feeling like you have to do everything on your own, and keep the momentum going for you and your team. Billionairecode.com/apply. If you don't have a daily huddle yet, put one in place and you'll find it is absolutely game-changing.