HOWWE FOR LEADERS

The key to driving change and achieving common goals as a team lies in cultivating the right attitude. It is not solely about possessing technical skills, but rather about being open-minded and motivated to embark on a personal journey of change. By adopting this mindset, you can foster a sense of community within the team and view change as an opportunity for collaboration, working together towards a shared vision and structure to attain the set goals.

In addition to attitude, setting aside time to be proactive is crucial in driving change effectively. Allocating dedicated time for proactive measures allows you to focus more intently on the most important goals and ultimately save time in the long run. This approach enables you to prioritize tasks and work towards achieving the desired outcomes with greater efficiency

An important ability for leaders is to prioritize and focus, to set the direction for their teams or departments. Leaders need to understand the organization’s overall goals and how their own teams can contribute to those goals. They need to inform and inspire their teams and help the whole team to prioritize and focus on what is important to the organization as a whole.

Howwe helps the entire organization to create consensus around what is most important and to focus efforts on the right areas to achieve goals.

There are some simple tricks for you as a leader:

1. Make sure the MIG is always updated with new data when available. Talk about new results when the team is together, before you start the Acceleration meeting.
2. Add a description to the MIG that everyone can see. Not only for your team, but also for the rest of the organization, it is rewarding to be reminded of WHY this MIG is considered most important in the team.
3. Connect the MIGs in your team to the goals in the team above, i.e. choose which goals in the team above you support with your goals. In this way, you help everyone in the organization to understand the whole and how the goals are connected

A link to a guide on how to add a description can be found here.

A link to a guide on how to align MIGs can be found here.

Weekly Key Activities are a powerful but simple way to shine a light and focus on a behavior or an effect you want to achieve in a team. Classic weekly Key Activities in Howwe are activities where you report the number of something, such as how many customers were booked or how many quotes were sent. It is also very common to ensure that an important step in a process gets more focus in order to have an effect on the Most Important Goals a team has chosen. But there are many ways to use the same method to achieve slightly different types of effects in a team.

In this video you see examples of Key Activities with a slightly different angle. We hope this can be an inspiration for you to consider which weekly Key Activity you want in your team. Keep in mind that weekly Key Activities can be a very good compliment to working with sprints.

The best advice we have for leaders who find it difficult to find a good weekly Key Activity for their team is to keep trying. Make small changes to the activity and see if it gives better results. Do not underestimate how often you will need to repeat the purpose of the activity to get the right effect.
And: Even the best and crispest Key Activity will eventually become obsolete, once the effect has been achieved or the behavior has settled. Then it’s time to recalibrate and find the next challenge. Good luck!

An important key to using Howwe in a value-creating way that ensures progress in reaching the Most Important Goals that the team has set, is to “find the strategic significance” in the Key Activities that are added to the Howwe Sprint.

What is meant by “the strategic significance”?

Howwe is a tool that enables teams to develop and improve their operations and thereby reach ambitious Most Important Goals. This is only possible if the team succeeds in finding the Key Activities that long-term improve processes and further develop the business, rather than adding activities into the Howwe Sprint that the team does anyway, the operational business.

How is a sprint planning meeting conducted in the best way?

Step 1: Create the right “mindset”, remind the team of the long-term strategy

Step 2: Discuss as a team: What are the most important things we as a team/management group need to do in the coming quarter to reach our goals in Howwe?

Step 3: Start backwards and create Key Activities in Howwe

The leader has the ultimate responsibility to ensure that there is a good plan going forward.

Conducting motivating and engaging Acceleration Meetings is a key to successful work with Howwe. Watch this video to get some advice on how you can motivate your team.

• The Acceleration Meeting is your opportunity to engage everyone in the activities the team does to reach your Most Important Goals
• As the leader, it is your role to show enthusiasm for the work the team does and to explain why their work is important

• To ensure that Acceleration meetings are conducted with quality, it is important that you as the leader come prepared. Howwe guides you through the meeting with a set agenda and an intuitive design. We recommend that you prepare by reading through what your team has reported before you start the meeting.

  • Are the MIG updated and can you talk to the team about the status?
  • Read the comments from commitments that the team reported the week before. Is there anything that stands out? Is there a success story that the whole team should know of?
  • Are Key Activities carried out with sufficient quality and does the team seem to understand the Definition of Done?
  • Discuss both successes but also obstacles and how these can be lifted.
  • Use Commitment Notes to clarify what exactly each team member needs to focus on during the next week.
• You can encourage motivation in your team by conducting the Acceleration Meeting in a specific way:
  • Encourage everyone in your team to talk briefly about the activities they achieved in the previous week. Ask questions and be curious.
  • Foster a culture of proactive planning, where everyone checks their calendars and makes a plan for the next week rather than waiting for tasks to spontaneously present themselves