A daily huddle without accountability is a daily huddle that is doomed to disappoint.

So say John Dyer and Dr. Mohamed Saleh, cohosts of the Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement. This episode continues the pair’s exploration of lean tools and the behaviors that make them work.

This week’s tool is the daily huddle, and accountability is the behavior behind it.

Dyer and Saleh launch their conversation with a simple back and forth about the elements of a huddle. It’s a short stand-up meeting, usually no longer than 10 minutes, suggests Dyer.

“Very prescribed but very effective,” he says. “You get a lot done in a short amount of time if you do it right. And it's one of those old adages of, ‘Hey, spending 10 to 15 minutes at the beginning of the shift could save you hours later on in that day because part of … what you talk about is what are our priorities for today, and what do we hope to get accomplished, and what customer orders are we really focused on today?”

Typical huddles also review performance, identify abnormalities, assign immediate actions to certain people, and, if barriers or obstacles exist, include escalation procedures.

Dyer outlines huddle structures he has observed at different companies, adding, “usually they will end with a simple question: What's something we can improve upon?”

With those words, Dyer says, “You're not really putting [workers] on the spot. You're not assigning them work. You're not getting them on teams yet. You're just priming the pump of their brain, trying to get their brain gears moving by simply asking, ‘What could we do better?’”

Why Accountability?

 “The huddle is just a tool. Accountability is the behavior that makes it work,” Saleh says.

He frames accountability as a compact or contract between leaders and team members, with expectations and follow-through on those expectations required of both parties. Team members commit to certain actions, and leadership commits to certain actions. It is not a one-way street.

“When we use the word accountability, it's not a punishment tool,” Saleh adds. 

The continuous improvement duo share examples of good huddles and bad huddles.

A common thread exists among the bad ones, Saleh notes. “It's a long status meeting. It's not an engaging meeting. It's a status check. It's a one-way thing. The leader is telling the team things. The team is not engaging. The discussions dominate, and we rarely talk about yesterday's learnings, but it's dominated by just metrics and results,” he says. “It's a repeated conversation. It's like we're not learning from this problem. I was here two months ago, and in the huddle, you talked about the exact same thing.

“The huddle becomes another routine without purpose.”

Saleh and Dyer also discuss:    

• Building trust: “The moment you act on something that comes up from one of these huddle meetings and actually do something that benefits the workers, their trust factor goes up exponentially,” Dyer says.
• Accountability as commitment: “Accountability is not clearly catching people in the act when they fail, it's actually the commitment of proactively preventing something from failing,” Saleh says.
• Formalizing accountability. Dyer suggests several options, but notes, “I think every process family should have a full-time dedicated process owner, process leader, that's embedded with the workers.”
• The relationship between escalation and ownership.

In conclusion, “The purpose of the huddle is not to report numbers. It's to create a daily system of commitments, response, and follow through. That's what it's all about,” Saleh says. “And so, a huddle becomes valuable when yesterday's promises [are] then revisited over and over again, and we learn from that.”

“So, a daily huddle is just a tool. Accountability, I think, is the behavior behind it, and the board may expose a gap … but accountability ensures that someone is going to respond to this. Leadership is going to remove the obstacles or barriers, and the organization is committed to learning what actions to take next.”