Management 3.0: OKR’s — Finding the way

There are many situations where organizational growth and team structures advance by leaps and bounds. In these situations, the lack of a clear direction towards collaborative work and, above all, alignment in the creation of company initiatives and their execution, becomes a winding path.

According to TES, (https://www.techexecutivesearch.es/) “the lack of planning is one of the main causes of team failure in companies. The lack or total absence of clear objectives causes chaos among the members of a team, who end up unhinged ”.

As a team management leader, you must always be aware that their objectives must always be aligned with the direction of the organization to which they belong.

Some time ago, I had that same dilemma, how to be aware of the objectives and align them with the organization. On that occasion, I coordinated the leading team of a community of practice and teaching in Agile Mindset, I lived a stage in which the energies were high, the impeccable commitment and opportunities to add value were unique.

Even with a team made up of 7 leaders and a community of 70 people, the impact that was reflected on the results was not consistent with the effort and work carried out by the entire community. What causes in different situations, the feeling of running in different directions.

This led us to re-evaluate what the priorities really were, if they were really aligned with the organization’s objective and if they were clear for all members.

So we decided to use OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results — https://management30.com/practice/okrs/). As we know, large corporations such as Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn had adopted OKRs and had been achieving better and better results, involving the perspective and creativity of a team, providing clarity, focus and collaboration when working towards the goals of each quarter.

What is OKR’s?

“OKRs are an easy way to create structures for companies, teams, and individuals. ”(Https://management30.com/).

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is an internal work method that, by setting objectives and their corresponding key results, allows organizing the organization’s work, defining workgroups, and monitoring progress. They allow the work of the entire organization to be aligned and set a single course for all its members. Basically, it defines the objectives of the company and how to measure whether they were met or not.

Previous definitions

Before continuing with the dynamics, explain that the ORK method consists of two basic elements: objectives and key results.

Knowing this, we had to ask two questions that, according to Henrik-Jan van der Pol, another promoter of this method, would help to guarantee success in its application: Where should we go? and How will we know that we have arrived?

Objective

The first step is to define the objectives that will show you a clear direction where to go. Having too many goals could lead to an excessive workload. These goals must be ambitious for the company and aspirational for the employees. They must also be approved by the entire organization. An objective of meeting the following: Answer the question (Where do I want to go?), Be driven by purpose, Qualitative objective and Is ambitious

Key results

Once the objectives have been set, the next step is to give them an answer, that is, define some results for each of them. Three results for each objective would be ideal.

These results have to make the objectively measurable, achievable, and limited in time and, of course, help to achieve it. A key result must meet the following: respond to (How will I monitor myself to see if I am getting there?), Make the goal clearly achievable, Be quantifiable and SMART ( specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound).

How to apply OKRs?

To apply OKR’s, we define quarterly objectives, at the team and management level. In this dynamic, the participation of the entire team, leaders, and managers, was key.

To apply them, we follow the following steps

1. As a first step in the participation, we divided into groups where each group had to write what they believed were the initial objectives in brainstorming mode, aligned to the organization. Always creating challenging goals.
2. Step two prioritizing these objectives and voting for each team.
3. Step three, once again separated into different groups the design of the key results. Each objective had to have between three to four measurable key results and each key result had a progress indicator or a score of 0 to 100%.
4. We established key actions for each result, this means that based on the results you ask yourself, what do I have to do to obtain this?
5. Step 4 Socialization of the results of the dynamics.

Learnings

As a facilitator, I learned to create spaces where management and team leaders can express their initiatives and align expectations. I understood that this debate is necessary for any organization due to the benefits that it brings, such as clarity in communication, the involvement of all employees’ participation, a precise and clear direction, but above all the motivation of the people who feel they are protagonists.

The team took as learning, how to create ambitious goals designed by themselves, and make commitments on their own. The latter had the impact of creating periodic sessions on the review and progress of OKRs. Being able to give visibility of the real work of the team, based on metrics and creating a workflow based on objectives.

In my next experiment, they use the initial OKRs as the basis for proposing Annual OKRs and find a way to collaborate or add representatives from other areas of the company to the sessions. In facilitation, it would take more time to show easier ways to create ambitious goals so that allows people to focus on the big picture and achieve more than they thought.

As a result of the OKR’s, the teams improved conversations and coordination with other teams and areas, creating a culture of collaborative work at least in the teams linked to the community, achieving the certainty of being part of a greater objective set by the organization, this allowed the design of new proposals, the optimization of resources, as well as the visualization of possible risks on the way to the objectives.

Conclusion

It is a collaborative tool, which aims to simplify the way of facing the so-called main objectives of an organization, not only does it not only give a specific direction to those objectives, but it also provides tools to measure our progress. It also increases the level of autonomy and enhances self-organization.

Remember that always at the beginning of each OKR’s session, you must have a very clear understanding of the mission of the company because the first step is to establish a global general objective that should answer the question, where do I want to go this year or four-month period? Management involvement is important in these sessions.

Finally, I invite you to align the medium and long-term objectives with the objectives of your teams, using a collaborative tool such as OKR’s to improve the performance of your teams, improve the sense of belonging, establish indicators that measure progress, clarity, and transparency of what is important.