Delivering results by setting your objectives and key results
Results can be magnified through the alignment of everyone in the team.….
Results can be magnified through the alignment of everyone in the team. Having a clear goal behind which team members can push towards, free’s up the best thinkers to collaborate in unexpected directions, iterating to deliver beyond any initial expectations.
Whether called the “Commanders intent”, a WIG (Wildly important goal) or a BHAG ( Big Hairy Audacious Goal ), it should be something that points to a direction and inspires team members to do more that just comply. A key goal should be to enhance the intrinsic motivation of people as Dan Pink writeshelping them achieve, autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Many management systems exist attempting to align individual and corporate objectives — they differ in how much of the focus they place between individual and team contributions, and between prescriptive assignment of work to loose high level objectives:
The people are not the problem! W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught that any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem. The problem is inherent in the system. As a leader, you own responsibility for the system. Although a particular person can be a big problem, if you find yourself blaming the people, you should look again. (4 Disciplines of Executions.)
The challenge everyone faces in delivering great work is what the authors of 4 Disciplines of Executions describe as the whirlwind…
The whirlwind is urgent and it acts on you and everyone working for you every minute of every day. The goals you’ve set for moving forward are important, but when urgency and importance clash, urgency will win every time.
Important goals that require you to do new and different things often conflict with the “whirlwind” of the day job, made up of urgencies that consume your time and energy.
Executing in spite of the whirlwind means overcoming not only its powerful distraction, but also the inertia of “the way it’s always been done.”
The challenge is executing your most important goals in the midst of the urgent!
Further challenges in execution occur as a result of Friction and the three critical gaps:
- Knowledge Gap — The difference between what we would like to know and what we actually know
- Alignment Gap — The difference between what we want people to do and what they actually do
- Effects Gap — the difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what they actually achieve
Understanding that friction is ever present highlights why the system structure is so critical. At any point you could be running into issues related to the three gaps, course corrections can be easily made if the system you work in allows for them to be identified and adapted to.
Two systems that resonate with me in capturing some of the key features as mentioned above are OKR’s pioneered by Andy Grove at Intel, before being adopted at Google and the 4 Disciplines of Executions.
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results:
- Objectives answer the question “Where do I want to go?”
- Answering “How will I know if I’m getting there?” provides your Key Results
There are three simple parts in setting up OKR’s (as outlined in the excellent book by Christina Wodtke):
- Set inspiring and measurable goals .
- Make sure you and your team are always making progress toward that desired end state . No matter how many other things are on your plate.
- Set a cadence that makes sure the group both remembers what they are trying to accomplish and holds each other accountable .
This system allows you to provide alignment to key goals, with the flexibility of how the team might achieve them.
OKR understands that strategy and tactics have different natural tempos since the latter tends to change much faster. To solve this, OKR adopts different rhythms:
- A strategic cadence with high-level, longer term OKRs for the company (usually annual).
- A tactical cadence with shorter term OKRs for the teams (usually quarterly).
- An operational cadence for OKR tracking results and initiatives (usually weekly).
See the weekly communication quadrant below as a way to manage this.
… people want to be accountable and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is a pathway to that destination… The opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the behavioral compass, they point us toward different destinations. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. And this distinction leads to the second element of Type I behavior: mastery the desire to get better and better at something that matters. (Dan Pink — Drive)
Replacing HiPPOs with Experiments
OKR can replace the HIPPO with experiments that allow the team to learn and iterate.
It enables teams to adopt Hypothesis-Driven Development…:
- We believe <THIS CAPABILITY/ACTION>
- Will result in <THIS OUTCOME>
- We will have confidence to proceed when <WE SEE THIS MEASURABLE SIGNAL>
In this model, the review is not about showing deliverables anymore. The team uses the review to discuss the metrics and the main hypotheses to improve them.
Some further pointers on setting up OKR’s is that they should be:
- Set quarterly and annually and graded each quarter
- Measurable and set as stretched targets so you only have a 70% chance of achieving them — they should feel a bit uncomfortable
- Reviewed weekly by the team — set a cadence that makes sure the group both remembers what they are trying to accomplish and holds each other accountable . “Mondays are for promises; Fridays are for winners”
- Set at personal, team and company levels
- Available to be viewed by the whole company — everyone in the company should be able to see what everyone else is working on (and how they did in the past).
Also see The Art of the OKR, OKR’s to track your personal goals and anything by Felipe Castro.
In 4 Disciplines of Executions the authors highlight keys to success are to:
- Focus on the wildly important
- Act on the lead measures
- Keep a compelling scorecard
- Create a cadence of accountability
Don’t Become Too Rigid!!
In his book Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan highlights two key issues with becoming too prescriptive in the system you adopt:
- The first is , Goodhart’s law . Once people set their OKRs , they’re going to do everything they can to hit them , including things that aren’t good for the business . As W . Edwards Deming observed , “ People with targets and jobs dependent upon meeting them will probably meet the targets , even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it . ”
- The second is that many firms try to use OKRs as a form of top — down control , ensuring that each subordinate’s OKRs fit with the OKRs of their superior . While this feels like alignment , it all but eliminates any chance of divergence or serendipity . A healthy system is not going to cascade in a perfect hierarchy of intent . We want outliers . We want wild swings . Not a lot , but enough . And it’s easy to forget to make space for them in a system like this .
This is mirrored by the sentiment from Google X’s chief of moonshots Astro Teller who says:
The context matters so much. The expectations matter so much. The people matter, the resources matter, but that’s not the biggest issue. There have been these times in the world — and sadly, they’ve been mostly military in nature — where you get a huge number of really smart people together — you know, not five or ten, but a hundred or more. And you give them the resources, but much more importantly, the expectation that they will produce miracles……
“You can do it. You can go ten times bigger. You can change the world that much — a huge change, not an incremental change. I expect that from you, and I don’t want you — metaphorically and literally — to choose choice A. Your job is choice B,” to tell those people and to give them that freedom.
Let me know what you think? I’d love your feedback. If you haven’t already then sign up for a weekly dose just like this.
