Imagine you've invited friends over for tacos and drinks.
No one is going to run this little party.
Sure, you'll be the one to decide when to eat and you prepare the menu, but you're not controlling each conversation or where people stand or how much
guacamole someone eats.
The party runs itself.
An Agile team's daily meetings should be the same.
Teams will have in place either some rules or norms that are established over time.
These might be that the meeting never takes longer than 15 minutes, that lengthy problem solving is done after the meetings,
and that meeting happens at 10am online.
Similarly, most teams establish a pattern of discussing progress, plans, problems, the three P's.
The best agile teams do this without someone running the meeting, much like having friends over for tacos.
This means no one calls on team members to provide an update.
The meeting does not run by a scrum master, coach, product owner, manager, or anyone else.
If a team is new to Agile, it's fine for someone, usually the scrum master or coach, to run the meeting.
That person can call on me and instruct me to provide an update on my progress since the last meeting, my plan through the next meeting and any problems
I'm facing.
Team members won't know what to discuss in a daily meeting until they have this explained and have experienced a few meetings.
But team members quickly figure it out, and when they do, whoever has been running the meetings can stop.
To get a team to the point where they are fully running a meeting themselves, I like to successively stop doing things.
First, I will stop asking questions like, what progress did you make yesterday and what is your plan for today?
If a team member forgets to answer one of the team's agreed-upon questions, i'll ask just that question of that person.
I want to reinforce the correct behavior in the meeting.
After perhaps a week of this, I'll stop calling on people.
I leave it up to them to figure out who goes next.I'll typically call the meeting to order, okay, it's 10 o'clock, let's get started,
and I wait for someone to get things rolling.
If someone asks who should go first,I tell them it is up them.
They can go alphabetically, east to west, geographically or random, however they choose.
Next, I'll stop starting the meeting.
Instead of saying, it's 10 o'clock, let's get started, i'll wait for someone else to do that.
Normally that doesn't happen by itself.
If people are used to you calling the media to order, they'll just stare at you until you do.
So you'll probably need to tell them that it is their meeting and they can decide when to get it started.
Here's a challenge.
Imagine someone is observing your daily meeting.
From just that meeting would they know who is the scrum master coach or team lead?
They shouldn't.
Leaders need to avoid running the daily meetings.
It's the team's meeting, it should be theirs to run.