Why Every Team Leader Needs a Weekly Huddle (And How to Run One That Actually Works)

Reading time: about 6 minutes

One of the biggest lessons from my time as a leader, first in the NHS, then over the last five years in the corporate sector, is that real team engagement doesn’t come from an annual review. It comes from what you do every single week.

That belief has only sharpened since I moved sectors. In the NHS, the pressure to justify every hour and prove value was real, but it wasn’t scrutinised in the way it is in corporate life, where you can feel the weight of every minute on a P&L. That shift taught me something: if you want a team that’s genuinely engaged, you can’t wait for one review a year to find out how they’re doing.

The problem with annual reviews

A lot of organisations still run on one big checkpoint a year, an annual objectives conversation, a performance review, done and dusted until next time. I think that’s genuinely mad!

I’ve always made sure every person I manage — whether I manage them directly or through other managers — has a proper hour with someone every four weeks: how they’re getting on, their performance, their wellbeing, their progress. Everyone deserves focussed time with their line manager for a quality conversation on a regular basis. I try never to cancel or move these around too much. I believe people need to be valued, and this is one of the ways I do this for my teams.

But even monthly isn’t enough to capture the day-to-day reality of how a team is actually doing, what’s landing, and what’s not.

That gap is what the huddle is for.

When everything went virtual

Before COVID, my meetings were all in person, stand-ups around a whiteboard, catch-ups at someone’s desk, the easy kind of connection you get from just being in the same room. I was managing a team of around 20 in the NHS when we all moved home overnight, and the shift was significant. I couldn’t just walk the floor and check in anymore. So team engagement, deliberately, structurally became more important than it had ever been.

That’s when the daily huddle became a fixture for me whatever size team I’m leading, seven years on. These days that’s often across the UK, Europe and India, so timing has to flex but the format doesn’t.

The daily huddle, in short:

• 15 minutes, first half hour to hour of the day
• Not micromanagement – nobody’s chasing task lists
• A quick, informal check-in: is everyone OK, have they had a good weekend/evening, do they have what they need
• The point is visibility and availability, both ways

That daily rhythm matters. But once a week, I’ve found something longer is worth the time.

The weekly extended huddle

Over the last five years I’ve refined a longer version. I aim for 30 minutes, sometimes it runs over when the conversation’s good, sometimes it wraps early. It draws heavily on the retrospective structure from agile project management, which I came to appreciate properly about ten years ago. I’d spent a long time around IT projects where “lessons learned” happened six months in, or after a project failed, or once a year by which point everything useful had been forgotten. Agile’s approach of reviewing and reflecting every sprint stuck with me. This huddle is that idea, applied to an ordinary working week.

It has four parts:

• Priority review — quickly go through what was agreed last week, person by person. Nothing here should be a surprise if you’re checking in daily, but it gives the whole team visibility of what everyone else is working on, not just what I happen to know.
• Retrospective — what’s gone well this week, and what hasn’t. This is the part I have to keep steering people back to, because everyone’s instinct at work is to reach straight for the to-do list. This isn’t “what did I deliver”, that’s already covered in priorities. It’s how it felt. That’s a different question, and it takes people a few tries to trust it’s the one you’re actually asking. “Gone well” isn’t always a big win. Sometimes it’s someone saying they finally cracked a problem that had been bothering them for a week, or that they felt genuinely switched on and productive for the first time in a while, or that a colleague really listened to them properly, or simply that they were in a good headspace all week. “Not gone well” is the same, it’s rarely the work itself. It’s more likely to be a run of ad hoc requests that never let them get near their actual priorities, something breaking that derailed a whole afternoon, distractions at home pulling their focus, or just not feeling motivated and not quite knowing why. We always start with the wins, because it’s too easy to jump straight to what’s wrong. And the honest half only works if people feel safe saying it, which means I go first. If I’ve had a rough week, I say so. That’s what gets everyone else being honest too.
• Ideas, lessons and actions — whatever’s come up that’s worth sharing,so it doesn’t just evaporate. Sharing ideas and lessons with the wider team to get feedback and learn together. A great way to keep the team motivated through learning, trying new things and encouraging new ways of working or innovative developments.
• Next week’s priorities — agreed together, and deliberately narrow. This isn’t every item on someone’s list, it’s the must-dos, not the nice-to-haves. The things the business actually needs. The things we’ve signed up to deliver for the organisation, that genuinely move things forward. Not an optimistic wish list padded out to look productive — a short, honest list of what will really add value, so that when we come back to it, it’s achievable and worth celebrating. For me this links back to the wider roadmap that has been developed with the business, so easy to draw on and bring in for priorities for the team.

Why Friday, not Monday

I ran this on Monday mornings for years, reflecting on the week just gone. Then my team told me something that changed my mind: by Monday, they’d had a weekend to forget how the week had actually felt. So we moved it to Friday morning instead, reflecting while it’s still fresh, then walking into the weekend having actually closed the week out. Small change, real difference.

The bit nobody sees: the prep

For a long time, this all lived in a Word document I’d share live on screen, and later in a static Confluence page. Every week meant the same manual routine. Copy last week’s page, move the priorities up, clear the retrospective boxes, get it ready before Friday. It worked, but it was admin I did alone, and none of it rolled up automatically into anything. When I wanted a monthly or quarterly view of what the team had actually achieved, I was piecing it together by hand from old pages.

That gap, a simple space to capture the huddle each week and something that actually compiled the story over time, is what I built the Team Huddle Tool to close.

What it gives you that a static page never could

• The same four-part structure: priorities, retrospective, ideas & lessons, next week. All built in, so there’s no weekly rebuild
• Every session saved, so you can look back over history instead of overwriting it
• Reports that pull the weeks together automatically: monthly and quarterly views, ready to export, instead of hand-assembling them yourself
• Runs entirely in your browser, nothing to install, nothing leaves your device

I built this from twenty years of actually running teams, not from a theory of what a team tool should look like. It’s the exact process my teams have used and helped me refine, just without the manual admin I used to do the night before.

If you lead a team, I’d genuinely love for you to try it. Download it, run it with your team, and let me know how you get on. What worked, what you’d change, what’s missing. I’m always up for that conversation.

👉Get the Team Huddle Tool — link to product page

Happy huddling.