Have you written brilliant goals with your team but now the process is falling apart?
Here are 4 actionable tips to turn the ship around:
1. Assign champions for each Objective.
- They are not accountable for doing the work but they are accountable for running the process.
2. Embed regular OKR team check-ins into your cadence.
- The more often the better.
- This is your opportunity to see if you’re making progress and discuss options to start or accelerate progress.
- If you don’t do this, expect nasty surprises at quarter end.
3. Make OKRs visible.
- At Stellafai we often talk about information refrigerators, where valuable information is hidden away.
- Your Objectives are the outcomes the majority of work is striving towards achieving. Your Key Results tell you if you’re making progress towards those outcomes. The information doesn’t get much more valuable than that.
4. A further way that you turn the ship around, is to align your teams around your business goals. A key aspect of this is to make your strategy actionable:
Use outcomes to connect strategy and execution
▪ Imagine if everyone had a common understanding of the target outcomes of your organisation. That all work was focused on achieving those outcomes.
▪Our strategy tells us how we will achieve our vision. This can be broken down and expressed as a series of outcomes. Outcomes that set clear intent.
▪These outcomes can be cascaded and shared with teams so that everyone understands where we’re going and their role in achieving success. Then we can all execute against that.
▪ This system enables companies to connect strategy and execution, driving organisational clarity, alignment and focus.
Thinks about the comms
▪ A big presentation at the start of the year with beautiful slides DOES NOT WORK
▪The key thing to remember is that communication is the message received not delivered. In fact, what really matters is what your team remember.
▪Keep the message simple. Distil it down to something clear and memorable. I use the Objective part of my OKRs to do this plus a few words to explain why that Objective supports the strategy. Objectives are quite simply directional statements of intent.
▪Repeat the message. My rule of thumb is when I’m feeling like a stuck record, that is when most people are started to take it onboard.
Measure progress. Often
▪If your Objectives are where you are going, Key Results are how you measure progress. KRs make your Objectives measurable.
▪Let your teams define their own KRs, and give them freedom about how they will achieve their Objectives. That freedom, trust and responsibility will unlock amazing things.
▪Enable your teams to measure progress frequently, ideally weekly. This is not a status report, your OKR check-ins as a tool to drive the discussion to increase performance as a team.
▪The more often a team checks in, the more they are learning and improving.
