How To Crush Your Goals with OKRs?
Setting goals and achieving them can often be an exhilarating experience, especially if you achieve something you never thought you could in the first place. Several TED Talks, interviews of successful people, podcasts, and books are often rife with life examples of how someone seemingly ordinary goes out to achieve the extraordinary, inspiring millions along the way.
While we can see the triumphs of a successful person laud them easily, all the struggle and hard work they had to put in to get there often get missed out by many. This could lead us to think that our favorite footballer, our favorite actor, or author — all have something that makes them extraordinary. Some secret sauce. What if we told you, that one such ‘secret sauce’ is a readily available formula, something that promises results, and one you can start implementing TODAY?!
Sounds too good to be true? Well, let us introduce you to the magic of OKRs or ‘Objectives and Key Results’.
What do some of the biggest companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Skype have in common? They believe in the OKRs framework and use it to scale new heights every day. ‘OKRs’ or simply, ‘Objectives and Key Results’ encourage you to go after all your audacious and truly big goals — the ones you think you can never achieve in your wildest dreams.
The Framework allows you to break your bigger goals down into bite-sized activities that you can keep a track of by yourself. For example, if you’re looking to get into an Ivy League School in a year, or publish your own book — OKRs help you achieve just that. A distant, wild dream is then pieced down into actionable, achievable tasks that you can keep a track of very easily.
OKRs have established themselves as a time-tested model to deliver results — whether it is for your personal or professional goals. Here’s how:
The Objectives and Key Results framework can be divided into two primary components. You guessed it right — a. Objectives and b. Key Results.
Your Objective is your goal, the one that you’d like to achieve at some point in your life. Your Key Results are the measuring yardsticks by which you can gauge whether you have achieved your Objective. Typically, every Objective has at least 3–5 Key Results that are telling of your success.
Objective: Improve Lead Generation and Conversion
Key Result #1: Generate 10K qualified leads
Key Result #2: Improve conversion by 5%
Key Result #3: Optimize social media channel engagement by 2%
Experts recommend that you can have three to five Objectives that you can set for yourself in a year, with one to five Key Results for each Objective. Since you’re going after seemingly big goals that you wouldn’t normally, the OKRs framework gives you the flexibility of being focussed for an entire year on your Objective.
What’s more — if you are successful in achieving 60–70 percent of your Key Results, you can consider your Objective complete.
Most goal-setting strategies and frameworks are focused solely on results with little focus on you — the person who is supposed to get the goal completed. Here’s where OKRs make all the difference.
As experts in the Framework and sticklers to goals ourselves, we understand that focus and alignment are the two most important factors, the key ingredients to achieving your big goals. While most Goal Setting Tools overtly focus only on the end goal, the OKRs framework, while still focussing on the outcome, ensures you are motivated and on track throughout.
To begin with, the Objective you choose, the Key Results you put in place and the Initiatives you wish to take up to achieve them are all designed and hand-picked by you.
Secondly, the OKRs Framework supports you with regular check-ins done weekly, monthly, or as frequently as you please. Through these frequent check-ins, you are encouraged to take a holistic look at the initiative you’ve picked for yourself — whether you’re enjoying doing it, and mainly, if the initiative is producing results for you. If an activity you picked isn’t quite doing the job, you’re encouraged to pick another activity to achieve your Key Results.
Through these check-ins, the OKRs Framework promises a unique yet workable framework that puts you at the center. The best part? You get to manage it all, without ever feeling burdened or overwhelmed by your big, audacious goal while still taking real steps in achieving it.
Excited about setting your first OKR? Getting Started for Free at OKRsHub.
Originally published at https://blog.okrshub.com on April 9, 2021.
