1, 2, 3! Corporate Huddles
It is one of the Management 3.0 practices to empower work teams. Referring to the Huddles used in football in which before each play the defense or the offense hold a meeting to plan the play, the Corporate Huddles are sessions in which the work teams are the ones who discuss the issue (s) for the which session was held, that is, a decision is not made “from above”, from the management or the direction, but rather, the decision or solution of the subject discussed is taken by the team, being submitted before to brainstorming and later a discussion to arrive at the best decision on the subject in question.
This practice is very helpful to stimulate the active participation of the team members and thereby achieve their empowerment. The theory of change management mentions that when we integrate the people who work the processes into the planning of the change, it is more viable and effective for people to contribute to the change, precisely what is sought with empowering teams and a great way to do so is through the Corporate Huddles. What we can gain by using this practice is Agility, since we decentralize decision-making so that they are taken by the team with which we not only gain agility in our processes, but we also support the members of the said team to grow professionally and as individuals for being part of the definition of the solution and its application, feeling familiar with the organization and an important member of the team.
We carried out this practice in conjunction with an agile work team in which I was participating as Agile Coach due to a failure in the process that we could detect, we were developing and testing software quickly but for some reason, we could not have deliverables, so we decided to review it in a session agreeing as to the main problem that we were all making progress in different functionalities or activities but it was not effectively prioritizing to achieve deliverables. Once inside this remote session, since we are working in this way due to the pandemic, I referred to the fact that the session we were about to have is the Corporate Huddles practice of Management 3.0, since the decision to be made in this case, the We were doing a way of prioritizing and assigning activities as a team, each one contributing something and defining this new process to apply it based on and justifying that we used this practice because those who work on the process to achieve an increase in the product is the team, with which they could know the areas of opportunity within the current process. We define the use of Kanban concepts such as; WIP limitation and visible workflows for the next process to pull the tasks of the previous process and we made a process diagram to review the possible improvements or refinement of the same process and diagram with the advance of time. The reaction to the way we carried out this practice was great and widely accepted, since it was not being inherited, or forcing things to be done in one way, but rather, the team was empowered to define and later apply the process. To end the session and simulating an football huddle, we turned on our cameras and put our hands in the center, a kind of celebration mentioning the name of the work team, the objectivity of the sessions is very important but without neglecting the coexistence with our colleagues, we must remember the most important thing within the team is communication and remember that we are people, not machines.
Each member of the team that participates in a Corporate Huddle must express their opinions in this regard and the decision or agreement is taken together. There must also be a mediator or facilitator with passive participation within the session to guide the team towards the decision and not wander within the session. For the following facilitation of this practice, I will create a diagram in MURAL and use facilitation techniques such as parking lot in addition to implementing voting on the topics to be discussed to make the use of the practice more visual in addition to agreeing to turn on the camera, as a facilitator It is important to detect non-verbal language since it can be used to find out if, in reality, each person on the team agrees with what has been decided as a whole and also to collaborate more productively, which serves to know the effectiveness of the practice.
Ultimately, this practice helped us to make the decision we needed at that time since it was something corresponding to the team and way of working that we had at the time. From my point of view the learning was that empowering the team is a great step to develop agility with decentralized decision making and the advice focuses on remembering that several minds think better than one, we empower and work as a team for compliance with the goals.
