Daily stand-ups designed mainly for status updates and unblocking create a disempowering culture where leaders solve blockers in ways that waste everyone's time instead of building real autonomy.
We can talk about what might be the reasons to do a standup and reasons not to do a standup, but if you're doing it for status updates and kind of purely unblocking it. And unblocking meaning that we block everyone else in the company's time to have one person share their blocker and then unblock it, like, I think that's going to be an obvious math equation that we're going to look back on and realize, wow, that was really dumb that we took everyone's time to go do that. It's tempting to me, I think it's tempting to any leader, like at different phases to do stuff like that, because that is the, hey, I'm going to show up and I'm going to go line by line and be the hero and solve this and this and this and this. And you're all just going to step up and say what your problem is when it's there, and then I'm going to come in and I'm going to solve it for you and get you to move forward, and then you're good to go and you can finally be productive for the day. That's not a very empowering culture to build, and ultimately that's going to come back to create more harm than good for whoever that leader is.
