A Daily Connection: A way to grow your team every day

David McThomas
Coaching Conversations
3 min readFeb 18, 2020

“A daily opportunity to Strengthen your Interconnection with the People around you. To Understand each other’s Worlds and to extend the Offer of Support.”

If you have worked in or been around Scrum, you will have heard of the ‘Daily Scrum’. This event/ceremony is designed to bring people together and has a structure in which to hold this event. I am interested in…

Going Beyond The Defacto Format

There is a standard format for this ceremony or standup, and this is…

“What did I do yesterday?”

“What will I do today?”

“Do I have any blockers?”

I have seen time and time again teams sticking to this, and it never changes or evolves. It ends up resulting in disengagement, frustration and just another Scrum checkbox to tick. You may even find that people stop coming…

The real power of your team is the people and the strength of their interconnection, not what they are doing.

I would encourage you to start thinking about the themes you could have for your sync’s and what are the powerful questions that would help the people explore that theme. If, say a first theme was ‘Interconnection’ why not spend one week using the sync’s to strengthen interconnection?

You could ask the following questions to strengthen that interconnection…

“What one word best describes how you are feeling today?”

“What was your best moment from yesterday?”

“Who would you like to work with today?”

“What does success look like for you today? And how can the team support you in obtaining it?”

“What is at risk for you today, and how can we reduce that risk?”

Just remember what is offered as the standard format may help you get going, but I encourage you to evolve this as early as possible to meet the needs of your team.

I would encourage you not just to implement what a guide says but to explore the topic with your team by asking something like:

If we were to meet as a whole team once a day, for a short period, what would we want to walk away with?
What would success look like?
How might we want this to change our day?

To finish, some of the key things I try to remember are:

  • Location: Change the location at specific points; introduce a new perspective. Even maybe try doing one with your eyes closed, imagine what might happen if we are focusing through our other senses :)
  • Questions: Don’t lock yourself into the same old questions, tune into when that food for thought has gone stale and bring in some fresh food.
  • Relevance: How and where you are holding the space should be relevant to what you are trying to get out of it, otherwise this could break the rapport.
  • Purpose/Intent: Continually explore the purpose and intent of this and how you could strengthen it moving forward.

I would love to hear your thoughts and stories and please remember #keepitfresh

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David McThomas
Coaching Conversations

Dedicated to unlocking Human and Organisational potential, through Professional Coaching and Powerful Breakthrough Questions