The Daily Stand-Ups Anti-Pattern (+ Alternative Async Methods for Planning, Trust, and Momentum)

Hello, hello, hello everyone, and welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host, Kuba Gretzar, and with me on the call today is Gray MacKenzie Zenpilot, founder and CEO, and as many of you are aware, previous Agency Journey host Gray, it is so good having you back on the show.

Yeah, it's nice to come on on this side. I don't have any of the pressure. Just show up and say random things.

And then we're good to rock and roll. Yeah, definitely. And we did make a promise to our watchers and listeners that there's going to be more Gray episodes coming in the future. Well, we've got a fresh one for you today. We're going to talk for an indeterminate amount of time about one project management, what I find to be an anti pattern, actually. And we'll unpack why we think that might be or when it might not be an anti pattern. But let me start with setting a little bit of the context. I was having a conversation with a friend who works at an agency. They had some ClickUp questions. So we jumped on a call. I did a mini consultation. I hope that would make you proud there, Gray. And within that conversation I asked, how do you update your ClickUp? How do you update your project management software? And they basically said, well, we do a daily standup at the beginning of each day we meet and we ask ourselves, I mean, a lot of the watchers and listeners probably, probably are aware of the questions, like what typically happens on that kind of meeting? Right. How would you paint that?

Yeah, I think the classic scenario is, and some teams have tried to do this. You know, there used to be a lot of slack bots for this. I'm sure some people still use it. But what did you accomplish yesterday? What's the one thing you know? Or the, what are the three goals for today? And then is there anything blocking you? Or like the three classic questions.

Exactly. Is there anything blocking you? Like how. What can I do to unblock you? But the conversation got really interesting from that point onward because what they said is that this is a mechanism not even for project management. And I'm trying to kind of build the context in your head so you can kind of address from, from your position of experience, like how you would approach this or potentially replace this. They said the person I was talking with that they, the team members need that to get unblocked. Also kind of in an emotional sense, you know, like they find their work daunting at times and they need to, like, part of it is encouragement, part of it. A big part of it is accountability. You know, just having the sense of somebody's there on that call, they're counting on me, or, you know, I asked specifically verbally for help and I received that help. Now, you know, it is stated that I'm unblocked, et cetera. So it's not all just informational and organizational. There's like an emotional component to it as well. So I looked at this and the advice I shared on that call was basically, this should not be happening. And maybe it was a knee jerk reaction, but I said this should not be happening in that kind of way. And it is a little bit concerning that this is needed in this kind of capacity, both for the project management side, the emotional side. But that's why I wanted to have a conversation with you about it and to kind of explore the nuance. Okay, so they're having a daily standup where all of this happens. The manager claims that, you know, this is needed for the team to actually get unblocked and get going. What do you think here is, you know, is there a part of this that is good? How would we potentially move this more to Async? And kind of based on your experience, where does this fall?

Yeah, that's a great situation. I am proud of you for jumping on and having that conversation. So I would always want to know the context. Like, is the culture good? Is it a high performing team right now or is the reason to have the conversation? Like, no, we are not as high performing as we'd like to be and, or there are, you know, cultural issues around how we do work together. You know, this feels slow. We're not getting the results we want. We're missing context, we're wasting a lot of time. Like, what are the, what's the outcome? I think for, you know, the beautiful thing about building a business is like you get to try out all these kinds of experiments on yourself. So as a general rule, I think that type of standup we're going to look back on and be like, wow, that's, you know, really dumb that we did that every day with a lot of, a lot of teams, you know, and that's going to be a phase of, hey, we've got 20 years where this became a popular thing because here are the couple companies that everyone looked at and that's what they did. And so we all adopted it and, and tried it out. But I think that will go away. That is already going away in a lot of different companies. And we can talk about like, 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 really a. It's tempting to me. I think it's tempting to any leader to do 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.

That does feel like it. I took part in meetings like this, both from the perspective of the person reporting and when I was in my team leadership role. And it kind of felt like, you know, you set them up, I'm going to knock them down for you. The word you used here, like being like a hero to the team, it feels good in the moment, but like you said, it's not like long term, it's not empowering. And I think a lot of people in that kind of situation, they feel or like, you know, at some point they have a moment of realization, like I'm making them more dependent on me, not less, and then what to do to actually reverse that trend.

Right. Did you, and you may not want to say this because you might be recording this in order to send it directly back to whoever this person, this friend is, but do you have a sense of what the culture or productivity or performance level of the team is?

I didn't get that far in the conversation. I will say what passed through my head and what passed through my head is that it is a little bit concerning that this level of support is needed here. But I didn't want to make assumptions on like the, the overall performance of the team. I think there's a lot of layers to this. Some people have very high skill levels, but there's an element of motivation or mindset. You know, I like to talk about mindset. Right. There's an element of like being your own worst enemy. And if that time with your manager direct helps address that to some extent, I mean, I can see the logic behind it. I still think though, something should be built that's asynchronous, that's more scalable, more empowering so that they can kind of be their own hero in that sense. Long winded way to answer the question, but it wasn't entirely clear.

Well, I think there's, there's probably more than this, but there's three main ways or three main reasons to do a daily standup. One is planning. Like we haven't planned well. We're constantly tweaking the plan or the strategy and there's probably some stuff like, you know, I don't know if you're inventing something or doing some scientific discoveries. Like there's, there's probably an area where like we can't pre plan a lot of this. We're making it up every single day as we go. Second one I think would be trust. Like, hey, do I trust that people are actually getting stuff done that they, they can be high performing in a more autonomous or async way or, or, or whatever else? I think the third one is momentum. And I think out of those three, momentum is a really potentially valid reason to keep a daily standup. We can look at some of the largest companies and what they do with their, they, they don't often do this with their highest level folks, but with boots on the ground, employees in warehouses or in stores, a ton of them have a daily standup. And part of that is we're trying to keep everybody bought into what we're doing. And to the point about like, hey, this work can be emotionally overwhelming or this is just a hard job and the rewards are not that great. There's a higher level of motivation you're trying to deliver every single day. It's way easier to keep a team who's super successful and feeling the rewards from that motivated than a team that's struggling. And the rewards are not that great right now. So. And it's just part, you know, different season, just like coaching a sports team or anything else, different parts of the season or different years, that's more of a challenge and less of a challenge. That's fine. So anyways, I think the, the motivation piece, keeping everyone bought in Feeling like seeing progress happening, celebrating that, being excited about what's coming next. That's probably the most valid of the reasons I think for most folks listening. If you feel like you need a daily standup or running a daily standup to keep folks on track in terms of what they accomplished and what's blocking them and what we need to unblock and what's, what's happening next, a lot of that in my experience, going in and working with teams who have done this, in some cases on site or who are currently doing this, a lot of it is just a massive failure to plan. They're not planning stuff well or there's a master plan or communication. Like there is a plan, there is a vision in the owner's eye or in the team lead's eye of like, yeah, this is what's going to happen or the person who sold the deal. And so little of that gets communicated that it gets kind of peeled back day by day and layer by layer in those standups, that's where the context actually starts coming out. And so a lot of that can be done much, much better and communicated and articulated way easy. You use project management tools, you could write this in a document and share a lot of that stuff. There's a lot of different ways to hand that context down and give people clear planning. And the trust piece has to be, there's got to be. So like a lot of this starts with data and running a business on facts and not emotions. What is the scorecard for each person? What are the, you know, the objectives that they have? What are they focused on over the course of a year? What's the measurables that they are needed to drive in the organization? What are they focused on? The currential quarter, what are they focused on on a weekly basis? And if you've got that stuff in place, then it's a trust thing. Trust that people will do it and then verify it with. How are those things moving? And if they're not moving, then you've got to step up as a leader and you've got to have those hard conversations and push folks on those. Because no one's set up for success. You're not as the organization or business, they're not set up for success if they're consistently not delivering on those measurables either.

Right, right. So you mentioned three reasons, like the structure is beautiful. I want to follow the structure here for a moment. You mentioned three reasons that a daily stand up like that might be needed. You mentioned planning is one piece, trust is another and momentum is the third. On the subject of momentum, I wanted to add that I really resonate with what you said in terms of this being potentially the factor that makes you want to be in one space the most, whether it's a call or. I mean, I'm going to be honest, we just had a team offsite here at Zenpilot and the momentum I'm feeling from that, it's still here. And I'm actually asking myself in an async context, how do we keep that momentum going? Because it's sweet. Okay, so we'll get to that. I would like to get to that last. What I would like to do next with what you said is basically somebody's in that situation, they're doing the daily standup because of planning, trust and momentum. How about we try to give them a specific alternative of okay, here's how you might want to do it or how it's possible to get there asynchronously. And also mention the trade offs of like, there's parts of it that may never be the same asynchronously, but still there's, there's kind of benefits to going that way. Would you be open to that?

For sure. So I think what, what drives momentum? Like, what part of that daily standup feels like it gives the most momentum to you?

It's the interaction with people, I think, you know, that's the possibility to like when you're leaving a comment in project management software. The part that I'm kind of missing, for example, being on ClickUp versus being on Slack. On ClickUp, you stick to the fact, you stick to the information, you want to be kind of concise, et cetera. On Slack, you do have that additional element of just throw an emoji in there, throw a joke in there, throw a GIF in there, and same for a synchronous call. There's room to crack a joke here and there. There's room to get updates on everybody's lives or just see changes. You got a new haircut, whichever. The interaction, for me, it feeds me. I know not everybody's like that, but for me that kind of builds momentum. And it's like you can see people celebrating their wins or kind of getting, you know, through their blockers anyway, trying to keep the answer short. That's more or less that for the momentum piece.

Yeah. So I think the interaction part is definitely a piece of it. I do think there's massive differences between your personality and an engineer. Like, you know, you think of your typical engineer, like, I Hate those emojis. Like, please don't ever send me a gif again. Like, I don't want us, you know, I just want the facts. Just the facts, ma', am, is like the, the mentality. Here's what I'd like, but I think for most teams, what creates the sense of momentum is the, the feeling of progress, the recognition of progress. So I'd say is you're asking those three questions and what gets somebody the most excited to keep rolling is when they say what they got done and there's some moment of respect for that or appreciation of that from the rest of the team. Wow, that's awesome that you got that done. So I do think if you're not going to have a daily standup where that happens and, and like a lot of the worst standups and this might be. You might be doing a standup now and resonate with this is when people share what they got done and there's zero celebration or recognition of what actually did happen. So I think to create that, then you have to create some kind of culture of seeing what other people are doing, the good that is being done, and then recognizing that. And this is of all five of our core values at Zen Pilot, the one called Celebrate. I celebrate your good work is the core value that is the hardest one. That's the most aspirational for me. We tried so hard to make our core values non aspirational and just a reflection of like, hey, what is the team actually known for right now? And that one is the hardest one for me that we do have. Fortunately, we've got a lot of people on the team who are known for that and you'd recognize them for that. And I was having this conversation actually in Portugal as well with the team is like, in person, I'm really good at that. I see people doing work behind the scenes. Whatever else, I'll recognize that. I'll thank them for that. I'll point it out to other folks. And remote. I am so much worse at that. It's not right in front of me. I've got a million things to go do. I might even see it and just not. Not say anything about it. But I think for like that has to be. That's one of the biggest things for me to keep developing. And it has been a focus for a long time, like surprisingly long time for how bad I still am at it. But that has to be present whether you do a live standup or not. A live standup is. We don't celebrate artificial work or not good work or like artificial progress. But there's gotta be, this is the catch, people doing good. Like you've gotta find people doing good stuff and call it out and call it out as it's happening. So that's one of the better things about not doing it daily is hopefully you see it in the moment and can give a shout out to them, call it out in public. And so I think that piece is like the. So the alternatives, if you're not going to do a stand up, you've got to have clear scorecards, some benchmarks that everyone's running towards. It's measurable. Here's what success looks like in this role, on this project, et cetera. You've got to have planned work and articulated that, communicated that and given some transparency around the information there. So that piece has to be there. It's super common when I go in and audit someone's setup, the level of kind of like brought how broad a lot of the tasks that are assigned to folks in their current project management system are just like, man, I would have no idea what to like. I know that I'm running in this general direction, but boy, design the website is like, how long? What is like, I don't have any of the context here around what this should.

Right.

What this should look like. So there's got to be more time spent on planning to. That's just a communication tool that's like you gotta, you gotta communicate better in terms of what's going on and you gotta build a culture where you're celebrating folks who are making real progress and when they're not. The flip side is I think people really do appreciate we can talk at some point more about the like clarity is kindness and how often that gets said at Zenpilot and why that's such a truism is if they're not doing good work, you've got to give feedback on that too and try to react, recalibrate where their efforts are going.

Right, right. Okay, so a lot of threads to pull on here. I do have to say, like, if I were to associate one catchphrase with you and with Zenpilot in general, that is clarity is kindness. And there's a ton contained in just this one phrase. I do think it warrants its own separate episode and we're going to make it a good one. So now on the subject of momentum still, before we dig a little bit deeper into planning and trust, I think it would be useful for the listeners to actually comment on how we celebrate good work at Zenpilot or some of the tools and practices available here. Could you kind of comment on that and talk about why we have these measures, how it works?

Yeah. So we've got four maybe main ways to celebrate people's good work in the moment. I'll talk about that one first. So we'll go in the moment kind of our two weekly opportunities and then a monthly opportunity to do that as well in the moment. Inside Slack probably most teams have this a WINS channel or a success channel or you know, like there's something along those lines. So we've got a success channel. I don't actually always abide by putting it in success. Sometimes I put it right in the channel where it happens. So you know, hey Jeff, like I know you worked really hard to move these deals forward over the course of the week. Like here's, you know, I just saw this one come through and shout out for that or you know, hey, you know, whoever. Like here's what I saw. Here's the action that you did, here's the results that came from that. I recognize that and want to shout you out for whatever, you know, whatever that attribute is that you leaned into and the success that you've had there. And I think that being real time, not being in a dm, being public, like that's step number one. Whatever your tool for that is. If all of your team communication lives inside a project management tool, it lives inside a chat tool or wherever that lives, like shout people out there in front of the team. Second one is we use a tool called 155 for weekly check ins. The whole idea behind the name is it takes 15 minutes. So real quick time block for a team member to fill out and kind of do a self assessment of the week that then gets shared with their manager. It's supposed to take five minutes for a manager to review it, provide any feedback, clarification, whatever. And part of that process is the ability to give high fives and attribute those back to a core value that we have as well at Zenpilot. And so that's kind of a weekly basis and yeah, it is cool to see those get put in. I'd say the downside, and we haven't talked about this before, Kuba, what I don't like about that is everyone's submission due date for that is Thursday. So you see a flood of these on Thursday but because we're not living in the tool every single day, you see very few happening. Monday, yeah, Tuesday, Wednesday and there's just kind of this flood and, and so that's usually like a Saturday thing that I'm reading through the high fives that people got. And often I'm learning like, oh, I didn't even know that this person did this or that. So I think that's generally a good thing. There are. It's not a perfect thing, though. The other place weekly that this can live is in our level 10 meetings. So we've got. Each department has an L10. At the leadership level, we've got an L10 every week. And that's the opportunity to bring any of those like top wins into the headline section. If that had a tangible result or impact on, you know, the minutes of the business. I think calling that out and recognizing that across the team is the other weekly rhythm that's helpful and that one's live. That's. That's done together. And then the other live place that we do this is monthly. So in a monthly all hands, try to leave 10 minutes at the end of the all hands section for, for just those, those call outs and high fives, you know, in, in real life to the team. Recognize the attribute, recognize the action they took, the attribute. They were demonstrating the results that came from that. And high five for, you know, for what, what you did. So those are the four main ways that celebrating good work happens at Zen pilot in a remote and sometimes async, sometimes live fashion.

Yeah. And to use a classic gray mackenzie phrase, that's awesome. Go back to previous agency during the episodes.

I'm really often when teams are saying yes to that kind of work, it's. They've got excess capacity, they've got a lower utilization than they'd like to have. And so they're like, yeah, I can put my team members on this. We haven't done it before, but we'll figure it out. And I'm totally fine to be eat some of that cost because I don't have a way to get paid for the excess time that we have otherwise. So I'll take it on and we'll make maybe less money per hour than I'd like, but otherwise I'd be buying all these hours and, and paying and getting nothing for it. And so that's fine to make that choice. You just have to plan and say, hey, this is an intentional choice. I realize I'm giving you something that no one's figured out before. Like, we haven't done this before. Here's the things that I think are close that maybe will work or be helpful as part of this. And is there an outside resource who can help guide on this or not. So yeah, I think just having that intentionality around where work gets divvied up and then you know, as planning continues from there, then it's like hey, stuff is happening in the project. How are we staying on top of it? So this is where something like the account dashboard, the client health tracker I think is what we call it on the website right now. What are our practices around that? So so many times go into firms and they've got a weekly standup action.

And I would look at planning and trust next if you're willing to go to those other two. Okay, which one do you want to start with?

We start with planning and then go to trust.

Okay. Planning Async. So we mentioned kind of part of the daily stand up anti pattern is that it serves a planning purpose where need not be and it might not be the best use of the team members time. So then how do we move planning to Async?

Yeah, first thing is there's two types of work that come into any agency or professional services firm. There's work that looks like stuff we've done before and there's work that doesn't look like stuff we've done before. And so you need to recognize right away what category of work does this fall into? And probably the other side of the grid is like who's getting this work? Is it someone who's done this before? Someone who's, who's not done this before? The account dashboard, the client health tracker I think is what we call it on the website right now. What are our practices around that? So, so many times go into firms and they've got a weekly standup with their whole, sometimes whole team, sometimes just delivery team and they go line by line through every single account that they have. And people are frustrated, that's a 60 or 90 minute meeting and you know, they got to talk about their own accounts for three or four minutes or you know, like such a small percentage of that time. And so having specific rhythms and routines around the client health tracker, hey, here's the fields that you're updating every single week. Here's the habit I have as the, you know, head of client success or whatever my role is production director, whatever that role might be. Here's what I'm looking at those, here's the way that we're giving feedback, here's the questions that we're asking and answering. How are we measuring client health? How are we measuring our internal attitude towards that? The better. And then what gets escalated out of There is any client health issues that drop to X level now, they automatically go to our weekly team meeting. And now we're just focused on the accounts that had major changes and there's something that looks different, but we can put a ton of that work. We can make it way more intentional when you do. Hey, you've got three minutes to walk me through all your accounts. The level of detail I'm getting from you is going to be way lower than if we did this intentional client health tracker practice. And the level of feedback you're going to get from me or the level of accountability from me is going to be way lower. So inevitably, results are going to be worse than, you know, the, the synchronous, like very fast paced run through that's really hard to actually pay attention to what's happening.

Yeah. So I think what we're arriving at here is kind of layers of planning. And I think what's lacking in a lot of organizations, this might be an internal team, it might be kind of externally facing is like, I've heard this phrase in the IT world. I'm not sure how prevalent it is in the agency world. Information radiator. You ever heard of that? Okay, so there's a place that kind of radiates information that's up to date to a level of detail that is useful but not overwhelming. You can pull on threads, you can ask questions in ClickUp, you can leave a comment, tag somebody. So, you know, everybody's up to date on, you know, as, as needed on what's in the radiator. Radiator. Sorry. And then you just escalate. Like you mentioned stuff that gets past a certain threshold. So I think we went deep into the planning piece here to try and make this a, you know, a fairly compact episode. I think I would go into trust later. Look, watchers and listeners, you've got questions about any of this, reach out to us. We're happy to go deeper than find us on LinkedIn or, you know, message, message us messages on Pilot account. Leave a comment if you're watching on YouTube. Let's talk. Okay. This is all part of a conversation, starting with a conversation I had. Now we're recording. I'm sure there's going to be conversations afterwards, but let's cover the third reason people might be doing daily standups. Let's cover the trust part. And again, kind of in an async context, like this is the golden question to me. It feels like, like, how do you build trust in an async context? Like in the World of quiet quitting and people holding two jobs at once asynchronously. How do you make it so that you can trust them without micromanaging them? They can feel kind of safe also without being overly monitored. There's a lot in this question, but how do you start unpacking this?

Yeah, I think this all comes down to. So trust is built when expectations are met consistently over time. I know I've said this on the podcast before, but not. You're way better off purely meeting the bar over and over and over than, you know, one week we're way above the bar, we're doing the craziest things, and the next week we're way below the bar. Like, trust is built around just consistently meeting expectations. It's great if you exceed expectations as well, but if you consistently are hitting them and those are set shared expectations, that's the, the, like, the key piece here. Clarity is, kindness is those expectations have to be shared. We have to agree on what good looks like. So that setting expectations piece is the strongest piece. Is it that I want to be able to see that your computer is on for eight hours a day and how many keystrokes you hit. And like, is that the expectation that you're setting for people? I don't think so. Like most, but. But subconsciously that's often the expectation that does get. You know, hey, we're going to plug in Hubstaff so we can take screenshots of your computer every 10 minutes and I can know when you're online or not online. Like, the expectation is be online and be busy. And it. It's too easy for that to steer away from the expectation being produce really good work. And here's what that looks like. Here's the. The metrics that are tied to that. Here's the number of deliverables I expect, here's the amount of traffic increase I expect, here's the amount of leads generated that I expect. So I think that's the, the big first piece around trust is just having shared expectations around what good looks like. The second piece has to be then having conversations around that and seeing that those expectations are being or not being met and addressing that. We're either celebrating good work or we're addressing performance and everything else that happens. Then, like, you've got to decide, hey, how much, you know, this is the thing that you've got to be really clear in your culture about. Do you want people who are hungry and willing to grow or not? Because the expectation for somebody in the first three months is not going to be the same expectation you have for them six months and nine months later. And so you just need to be intentional in setting that, that, hey, I believe in your potential so much and what you can do that these goals are going to be, these are realistic and achievable for this quarter, but those are not going to be my same goals. As we continue to grow as an organization a year from now, like, those goals are going to be loftier and that may feel unfair to team members. Like, wow, this bar just like, I can never do good enough. The bar just keeps changing. And so the way that you talk about, communicate about and message, that has to be clear that that is not a, like, all of this creates more impact. I believe in your ability to grow and your potential to grow. And so the bar is going to keep changing. And I assume on the flip side that you are hoping your compensation changes as well as we go. And like, you can earn more, you can be more successful here or your role here grows and evolves. But those two things are tied together. Like, what's the impact to the organization and how can we keep laddering that up and what's the impact to you personally? And how can we keep laddering that up? And if you've got lower expectations of folks like, hey, I just want somebody who's in. Like, I've had this experience hiring for specific roles where I've said, like, hey, this is the role and this is the role that I need you to be in for a minimum of two or three years. So if you like, I don't actually want somebody who's as ambitious in this specific role. I need somebody who's super dependent. Like, there's just different traits and there's trade offs for each of those. So. But I think a lot of trust is around being super clear about expectations and then managing the business around the data. What's the, you know, how well are they performing against those specific benchmarks versus steering? I've got a choice there. You do have a choice still. Unless it's something that's never been done before. Like, this is where a lot of your contracted work may go and say, yeah, we as a company haven't done this before. Could I go hire somebody for this project who's already been down this road? Otherwise, you know, often when teams are saying yes to that kind of work, it's, they've got excess capacity, they've got a lower utilization than they'd like to have. And so they're like, yeah, I can put My team members on this. We haven't done it before, but we'll figure it out and I'm totally fine to be away from that.

I love it. You mentioned a lot of very interesting things here and also like something super quotable like trust is when I expectations are met consistently over time. I feel like there's also like a meta layer to this because we're talking about kind of bringing back the context of this daily standup. So on the one hand, there's the issue of trust. Like I can trust my team members to do this work as requested when requested by that time. What also came into my mind as you were speaking is expectations around actually how we communicate about work and specifically in our context. I mean, being clear, expectations are out the usage of ClickUp, right? This is the difference between working with, you know, a company that just does ClickUp and a company that either is zenpilot or zenpilot trained is that it is much more clear what the expectations are around communication within the tool. Like if there's overdos, if there's missed comments, if Slack is being used for communication, that should be in ClickUp that is flagged very quickly. It is very, again, clarity is kindness. It is very clearly stated. This is not what we're trying to build here. This is not how we're trying to run and operate here. And I feel like that helps build trust kind of in both ways. On the one hand, like as a member of the team, I can trust that if I overstep something in terms.

Of communication, eat some of that cost because I don't have a way to get paid for the excess time that we have otherwise. So I'll take it on and we'll make maybe less money per hour than I'd like, but otherwise I'll be buying all these hours.

I'll get the right feedback to get back on track. On the other hand, within leadership, indicating that to the team members means that if there isn't an update in ClickUp that means nothing happened or if there is an update in ClickUp, I can trust that information. That is super crucial because if that trust gets eroded, then I feel like that's when these meetings like these stand ups, that's kind of the, okay, let's get clear on what is actually happening.

And paying and getting nothing for it. And so that's fine to make that choice. You just have to plan and say, hey, this is an intentional choice. I realize I'm giving you something that no one's figured out before. Like we haven't done this before. Here's the things that I think are close that maybe will work or be something.

Let's get on a call. That's kind of when you give up, right? Does. Does any of that track?

Yeah, I think for sure. And I think there's probably like, the takeaway here isn't necessarily like, hey, never do standups or kill your standups. Right now it is, hey, are you wasting time on this? Like, are you eating up a lot of folks time either to fulfill an emotional need that you have or to fulfill. It's probably both, but. Or to fulfill a, you know, a lack of planning or like, basically a vacuum around information and a vacuum around clear expectations that you've not create. Like, this is your crutch for the lack of infrastructure that you've got built right now. So all that for sure resonates. And then I think there might be a season. Like there are seasons when we get injured where we do need crutches. So there might be a season where this makes sense. There might be a specific team where, hey, I realize we've got unclear expectations set right now, or I realize we need to find some way to pick up and. And create more momentum. And so for this specific season, helpful as part of this. And is there an outside resource who can help? We're going to plug in a daily standup or we're going to get together three times a week to do this. Like, I'm willing to pay the inefficient guide on this or not. So, yeah, I think just having that intentionality around where work gets divvied up and see cost because we've got to.

Be.

Like, we need that live time together until we figure out how to build the infrastructure. So I think that's the. Like, where I would land on this ultimately is generally speaking, and this is in my experience, like, the vast majority of the time. We've been able to eliminate a lot of standups over the years through our work with. With clients. Then, you know, as planning continues from there, then it's like, hey, stuff is happening in the project. How are we staying on top of it? So this is where something like the account dashboard, the client health tracker, I think is what we call it on the website right now. What are our. Generally speaking, it's a crutch. But crutches are useful sometimes and so don't, don't throw it out entirely and never, never look back at it as an option.

Yeah, right. If you're hurting, you might need these crushes. Right? Like what you mentioned is to me, it's kind of like a war room type of situation. You know, something, you know, an area of the business might be kind of strongly in the red, then you know, you need to hunker down on it a little bit more. Just as long as it doesn't become like through sheer inertia, something that you do out of habit.

And it's really inefficient the practices around that. So, so many times go into firms and they've got a weekly standup.

Awesome. Lovely way to tie a bow on this whole subject. I feel like we should give the watchers and listeners as a last point, kind of stuff to pursue. Like if any of this resonated, if they want to kind of improve their planning trust momentum. Like what would you recommend as either resources, reading material or I don't know, maybe part of this is somebody's listening to this and they would actually be a good fit to work with us. I feel like that's a relevant message to leave too. What would you say?

I would certainly say that like the, the best thing that you can do in that situation is to have a conversation with us. I realize this is not like there's a, probably a good chunk of folks who listen, hear this, who would have a conversation with us, who the first thing they should do is not work with us immediately. And I think there's a good chance that would be the recommendation in a number of these situations. That's been my recommendation to folks is, hey, you need to fill this people gap first or you need to work on like this specific area first with their whole, sometimes whole team, sometimes just delivery team and they go line by line through every single account that they have and people are frustrated, that's a 60 or 90 minute meeting and you know, they got to talk about their own accounts for three or four minutes and then love to help you get clear on the data and know how to get that accurately, get clear on what expectations you're giving to your team and help. Ultimately our mission is to help create more healthy, more profitable, more productive teams. And so that like that piece can all be a part of this. But there's aspects of that picture that even though that's our mission, we such a small percentage of that time. And so having specific rhythms and routines around the client health tracker, hey, here's the fields that you're updating every single week. Here's the habit I have as the head of client success or whatever my role is production director, whatever that role might be. Here's what I'm looking at those. Here's the way that we're giving feedback. Here's the questions that we're asking and answering. How are we measuring client health? How are we measuring our internal attitude towards that? The better. And then what gets escalated out of there is any client health issues that drop to X level now, they automatically go to our weekly team meeting. And now we're just focused on the accounts that had major changes. And there's something that looks different. Don't solve or we don't solve yet. Like, we don't solve the staffing issue here or we don't solve. You know, there's. There's pieces where we've got to refer to other people or say, hey, wow, that's a strange situation. And for what you're looking for, like, I don't know where to go. So I'm sorry that we talked, and I don't have a better answer, but that's just the truth. So I think that is the. But we can. We can put a ton of that work. We can make it way more intentional when you do, hey, you've got three the direct call to action. There's certainly more reading to do around this. And a lot of the, you know, this is no secret that we run on Eos. So a lot of the books in the entrepreneurial operating system library are helpful. There's a ton of repetition between those, and sometimes it's a little bit of a slog to work through them. But there's books there that are helpful. There's a whole bunch of, like, team and productivity books that we could get into as well. But I. I really think if you're trying to take action, like, the two places that I would go are a conversation with us and maybe the scheduling, that is the first thing. And the second thing is journaling, like, just taking some time to write out what's missing in our. If I was, you know, if I was Cuba and I was looking at this with an outside set of eyes, like, what would. What would the advice that he would give me be? Or what would the questions be that he would ask? Just some of the writing around. Here's what hurts the most right now, and what do I really want. Talked a lot about that in the past, too. Like, what do I really want this to not even necessarily look like, what do I ultimately want this to accomplish and create? Right. And that's the starting point. And then working backwards from there by getting the help and it's to walk me through all Your accounts. The level of detail I'm getting from you is going to be way lower than if we did this intentional client health tracker practice. And the level of feedback you're going to get from me or the level of accountability for me is going to be way lower. So inevitably results are going to be worse than, you know, the, the synchronous, like very fast paced run through that's really hard to. Is becomes much easier.

Yeah, I love that. I imagine, you know, this kind of journaling exercise, it reminds me of one of our recent episodes where you mentioned the, the Five whys exercise. Okay. We're doing daily standups and I'm not feeling so sure about them. Why? Because it feels inefficient. Why?

Or actually pay attention to what's happening.

Yeah. So I think what we're arriving at here is kind of layers or you know, you can dig into like why they feel necessary. Like you mentioned, you might arrive at a variety of different conclusions there. And you know, one of the conclusions might be maybe I don't have the right people on this team. You know, maybe, maybe that's where the key issue lies. And like you mentioned, you know, there's, there's people to talk with about that. If it turns out it's. It's operations. If it turns out, you know, you don't have good data in ClickUp or you don't trust that data in ClickUp, we are, we are the people to talk with. Go to zenpilot.com call if you want to just go the easy route or explore our resources first. There's a lot of our kind of thinking there about the Zen pilot system. But enough about that. I think that's enough of a cta. I think this is awesome. Gray. Like, you know, we took this daily stand up issue of planning and I think what's lacking in a lot of organizations, you know, this might be an internal team. It might be kind of treated as like a whole, you know, tip of the iceberg for everything that might be lying underneath. Externally facing is like the, that there's a. I've heard this, this phrase in the IT world. I'm not sure how prevalent it is in the agency world. Information radiator. You ever heard of that? Okay, so, you know, there's a place. So I hope this was informative for you as well watchers and listeners. Don't forget to follow like subscribe Agency Journey, ZenPilot on YouTube and all on all the podcast platforms. And that's it for me. Any other final thoughts? No.

That's great. Yeah, I think we've droned on long enough, but this is a fun one to dig into.

This was super fun. Okay. So thank you, Gray. Thank you, everyone, for joining us here today. And we'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.