At 8:55 every morning, the entire company participates in: The Daily Huddle. They go over: What’s up, Top Tasks, and The ROCK. Then they unlock the door.
High-stakes professions work this way. Military units brief before a mission, and emergency crews brief before a shift. Surgery adopted the practice at scale through the World Health Organization’s Surgical Safety Checklist, which opens with a short team briefing. In a 2009 New England Journal of Medicine study across eight hospitals, deaths fell from 1.5% to 0.8% and major complications fell from 11% to 7% after the checklist went in.
The leasing offices across your company’s portfolio carry lower stakes, and the logic still holds. A team that aligns before the day gets busy catches problems before they become huge issues. Skip the huddle, and the missing faucet in unit 203 becomes an issue when the new move-in arrives in your office – steaming.
Without it, the operation runs on each person’s memory. Missed follow-ups, a smoke detector chirping in the model, and a team member who doesn’t offer the concession special to a new prospect.
Run it with three fixed questions:
- What’s Up: Share personal or professional good news
- Top Task: What you are working on today
- Rock or Stuck: Do you need help from this group to move your business (task list) forward
Keep it standing and keep it to five minutes. Use the same three questions every day, so it takes no prep, and nobody can talk their way out of it. Anything that sounds like rambling – take it offline and run it to ground asap.
Discussion Prompt: Are you religious about the Daily Huddle? Why Not? Recommit!