You estimated that you would do x amount of work. You only did y. Or, you did x + z - wow, you are a great performer. You should verbalize your success more often.
A part of confronting reality, is confronting the prospect of under-performing employees.
I think your 'ideology' is blinding you a little bit OP, at least - if you want to base your concept of standups based on how they were formulated in the original Agile manifesto - 'At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.'
Frankly, most dev teams don't give a whit about Agile and just do stand-ups to keep the PMs and SMEs appraised of progress and to check in on a couple of things here and there.
If my estimates are padded to the point where I always complete what I commit to and my boss is happy with my output, what’s the problem? My boss gets value from being able to accurately convey estimates to clients, the client 9/10 gets the work done on time or maybe even gets a couple extra features completed in the same timeline, and I as the engineer, have a relaxed work environment, free of the stress of cramming every story point possible into 40 hours a week.
Seems like a win win win to me.
All this teaches employees is to lie to make themselves look good. If you really want to increase development velocity, implement better coding practices and devops and tooling and training and invest in your employees instead of making jump through stupid hoops like circus animals.
No, you aren't. You just either suck at estimation, or you deliberately underestimate to shine brighter in the eyes of your slavemaster. And if the rest of your team also "overperforms" consistently, there's a conspiracy, which means I will stop making you commit on stuff and will just ram more tasks down your collective throats, abandoning another aspect of the agile way of work.
See how easily such an abuse of standups can be turned around to make the very same person look bad? If that is possible, is the approach a good one?
> most dev teams don't give a whit about Agile and just do stand-ups to keep the PMs and SMEs appraised of progress
This is mostly related to PMs and SMEs pushing a perverted interpretation of Agile.
The rest of your message about unblocking early seems to contradict your first statement of waiting until scrum to ask for help.
Each of the loops is about shortening the cycle before you discover problems. These are seen through the lens of traditional waterfall software development. The problems vary in nature, from technical blockers and dependencies, to unrealistic deadlines and expectations, to not building what the customer wants (why we involve the customer early and do showcases).
In some ways the more mature your team becomes the more you can move past some of the rules. The 'standup' was designed to avoid the meeting becoming overly long, everyone would become foot sore. Once you understand and embrace making the meeting not turn into an hour long (or even 30 min long) meeting, the standing itself becomes less important (which is good because remote teams make this harder).
Similarly, there are even shorter cycles of being able to remove blockers now. Granted Slack team channels can be a blessing and a curse, but it does make it possible to just put problems out there for consideration[0]. These sometimes go unanswered though, which means that the aforementioned standup becomes a backup.
I've been part of so many lean/agile teams that all do things slightly different. The highest preforming of those were the ones where the trust was the highest. Great teams become "a rising tide lifts all boats"[1].
I hope you don't see this (and the previous post) as an attack. It's near on impossible from a distance to really see. It felt like a red flag but that's two lines of text on a semi-anonymous message board.
[0]: draft PRs also fall into this category. Though again, devs have to find time to read them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_rising_tide_lifts_all_boats
The standup has it's roots in the agile manifesto[0] (gross simplification). Specifically "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". The coming together every day for just a few minutes is an opportunity to ask for help (blockers).
Both the standup and to an even greater extent the retrospective are exercises in trust. I agree to show weakness and tell you and the team when I'm struggling with a task, or when things aren't going well, seeking continuous improvement. You agree not to use that against me.
The sooner roadblocks and problems are discovered the less likely they are to become larger problems. This is one of the fundamental benefits of a standup. But this requires trust. Recording and documenting for the purposes of performance management is probably the number one way of destroying that trust.
All of this means they're a very fragile beast. Prone to becoming exercises is puffery, or even worse a list of cards being worked on that you could just as easily get from the wall/Jira/trello.
The team also succeeds or fails together, a much better way of dealing with employees that are struggling is to use pairing (sparingly) to ensure that anyone blocked on a task doesn't face it alone. Some things are just hard. I've got 20+ years of programming under my belt and I still manage to struggle at times.
I've got the experience to work through this and ask for help where needed, but the earlier you are in your career the more imposter syndrome makes it desirable to crawl into a hole rather than ask for help. Standup in a great team helps break down those barriers. But only if a very fragile trust is maintained.
[0]: https://agilemanifesto.org/