Making you more effective through Strategy, Product, and OKRs
3 Things That Take Zero Talent That Kill Your Ability to Succeed With OKRs
These success patterns require ZERO talent or skill. Photo by Canva Studio.
It takes neither talent nor skill to make Objectives and Key Results work to achieve your strategy
I was sitting with a senior executive during a quarterly business review, as Program and Portfolio leads shared their slick PowerPoint decks with their latest OKR results.
After the fourth team presented their task list set of Key Results, the executive lost patience and remarked:
The only numbers in these OKR update decks are the slide numbers.
When we’re new to the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework, we may find them complicated and hard to get started with effectively, frequently slipping back into our old habits.
But achieving goals and making progress through OKRs is simpler than we might think.
None of these success foundations require talent or skill, but have the potential to make all the difference in our attitudes, effectiveness, and results with the OKR goal-setting framework.
OKRs as our Enabling Management System
Once we start from the basics of designing a set of strategic choices, OKRs represent a powerful Management System to turn our strategy into real results through our people.
As a twice-certified OKR and strategy coach, here are three dead-simple things that can derail our ability to take strategy and turn it into reality:
#1: Not checking in regularly
#2: Not running a retrospective at the end of each cycle
#3: Trying to do too much with our OKRs
Let’s break down each and take the guesswork out of goal-setting success.
#1: Not checking in regularly
This is the linchpin antipattern I see so many people make and more than anything else, will determine whether we succeed or fail with the OKR framework.
We could literally make every other OKR mistake possible, and write the worst OKRs.
Many people wait to craft the perfect OKR as an excuse to delay setting any goals or taking any action at all.
So it’s far better to write OKRs that are “just good enough” for now.
And this is what makes OKRs different.
They can’t begin to provide value until we develop the habit of setting and checking in on them.
So we agree to start where we are so we don’t delay our progress towards achievement.
Checking in at the Speed of Execution
Next, we’ll need to match our check-in cadence with our speed of execution.
The higher up in the org we set them, and the longer-term timeframe we set them for, the less frequently we’ll need to check in — for yearly Objectives, even monthly may do.
But the more leading we set them, and the closer to our client’s behavior changes, we’ll need to accelerate our decision-making.
For this, we’ll need to keep our Key Results front and check at minimum every two weeks — and weekly is even better, so we can use them to inform our choices.
The Key Result Owner leads the Check-In
At each level, check-ins only work when each Key Result has a dedicated Key Result owner.
Our Key Result owner isn’t responsible for the number — they’re only accountable for facilitating the weekly conversation, and seeing the necessary data gets pulled in time
No data available for this cycle? This fact alone will be a powerful input for our point #2 below.
Until we have data, and have the necessary conversations, we won’t have actionable insights to adjust our team-level activities, week over week.
It takes our Objective and Key Results, and uses the weekly check-in meeting as a forcing function.
We’re no longer obsessed with random tasks and activities, trying to “optimize our efficiency.”
The Four Square puts the single one true Objective and our few but crucial Key Results front and center.
Confidence, not progress
Running check-ins means we collaboratively measure our confidence in delivering each Key Result, week-over-week, and limiting any activities that don’t actively increase Key Result confidence.
We are able to focus on the check-in conversation, not any individual number or judgment next to any given Key Result.
#2: Not running a retrospective at the end of the cycle
Retrospectives represent one of our most powerful “Enabling Management Systems.”
No goal-setting or measurement system can provide value without regular retrospectives.
They represent our only way to get better both at
What we do
How we do it
It doesn’t matter how badly we did–
If we made literally every mistake possible
Crafted terrible strategy
Wrote bad Objectives and Key Results
Our only focus is to pick a single thing to work on, and keep it front and center and actionable over the coming cycle.
Key Takeaways: The Retro
Pick on single thing to improve
Progress over perfection
#3: Trying to do too much with OKRs
When we’re ready to use OKRs to unleash the power of our strategy and our people, we have the opportunity to target and achieve things that were never before possible.
The counter-intuitive learning is the true power of the OKR framework comes when we ask OKRs to do less, not more.
“OKRs are a vitamin to boost our best teams to create something new and achieve outsize results. They’re never a pain-killer for your organizational dysfunctions.”
I was in an international OKR coach forum, and someone asked how to set OKRs for the grounds crew.
Anyone who’s in a support role or who doesn’t have control of their time should never have OKRs.
When we’re first starting out, OKRs may be used as a way to plan your activities.
But OKRs work best as a key Management System to set goals and measure the effectiveness of our strategy and continuously improve our Strategic Capabilities.
Gradual Improvement
Lasting success can only be achieved through continuously moving our Key Result metrics quarter over quarter.
They represent interim achievements along the continuous road to improvement.
Setting Key Results that target 100% of anything puts us into the perfectionism trap that only sets us and our teams up to fail.
Key Takeaways: OKR Focus
We need to understand where we are by
Identifying a baseline
Focusing on continuous improvement– 50%, 60%, 80% better –
While accepting that life and market forces may have other plans, that not everything will go our way.
And that’s fine.
Our only goal is to understand where we are, have a quality conversation, and try to improve every cycle (see Number #1 & Number #2 above).
Conclusion & Takeaways
The Objective and Key Results framework represents a powerful Management System to measure the effectiveness of our strategy.
We identify a set focused set of choices for the coming cycle that can provide a shorthand, a quick glimpse into how our strategy is unfolding in real time.
By getting ahead of these three antipatterns, and learn to:
#1: Check in regularly
#2: Run regular retrospectives focused on picking one improvement item per cycle
#3: Focus our use of OKRs
We keep striving for continuous improvement, for excellence, without wasting our time with perfection.
And we may be pleasantly surprised with what we are able to achieve along the way.
