Successful OKR planning requires communication, accountability and patience
Companies from Google to Adobe have turned to OKRs to accelerate growth and drive innovation. When implemented correctly, OKRs establish alignment throughout an organization and help teams see how their work contributes to the company’s objectives. But a key component of OKRs is to understand that the success of the OKR framework will depend largely on the strategy and planning behind the OKRs implementation.
There’s a reason that so many organizations are adopting OKRs — setting hard goals and then achieving them is at the heart of being an amazing team. In Measure What Matters, OKR guru John Doerr writes about four “superpowers” of OKRs:
Many of these leading companies look to OKRs for annual and quarterly planning and the most successful groups take time to prepare a deliberate plan, and have a strategy for capturing and tracking their OKRs. Ultimately, planning is essential for great OKRs and a successful process.
Communication and dialogue are essential to the OKR planning process. Whether it’s the start of an OKR cycle, the fiscal year, or the kickoff of a major project, prioritizing transparency and building out a communication strategy will only help improve the process.
As you work to plan your OKR cycle, here are some tips to encourage positive discussions:
When setting your OKRs, you’ll want to make sure you have a simultaneous top down and bottom-up goal setting process - this will end up with something that looks a little bit more like a network of goals rather than a hierarchy or a tree structure. One of the absolutely fundamental principles of an OKR system is that they’re ideally used to empower, not constrain.
You want your system to provide guidance, context and direction, but then you must allow teams to develop their own goals off the back of them without dictating what their OKR should be.. The message to send is we trust you thave a go at drafting these on your own.
“One of the absolutely fundamental principles of an OKR system is that they’re ideally used to empower, not constrain”
If you're an organization that is keen to innovate, you want to allow people the chance to go off and try new ideas, test out new thinking and whatever those projects might be. They might not necessarily have a direct line of sight to the top level goals for this particular period. However, when somebody is asking for some time and some resources to go and focus on something, there isn’t any harm in integrating that with an OKR and ensuring that it stays within the review process, maps with the key goals, and provides for regular cadence of tracking and discussion.
Which is to say, an OKR doesn't necessarily have to align, but there needs to be a degree of governance to make sure somebody’s not running a project of their own, which is never going to produce any benefit for the business.
The OKR planning process benefits from contributions by all staff, from individual contributors, team managers, all the way up to the c-suite. Here are some examples of why bottom-up OKRs can be beneficial within an organization:
Amazing results tend not to be the result of an individual, but rather successful OKR outcomes most often require collaboration and cross-functional alignment with key players outside of your team. As part of each OKRs cycle, it will be important to proactively agree on any near-term dependencies outside your team before setting team-level OKRs. This is where defining clear ownership (a lead of the KR and contributors) as well as solidifying agreement on who owns specific tactics that will be part of this KR.
A business can build in methods to keep every team member accountable for their role in achieving key results, such as:
Continual improvement is an integral part of an OKRs process. By incorporating regular reflection and retrospectives, it will help to make goal planning and execution better the next time. OKRs (like any business process) should remain flexible and commit to making the process fit the culture and values of your organization. Some helpful tips:
When planning out your OKR cycles, we want nothing more than for your organization to be the best version of itself it can be. Successful OKRs take patience and great planning to keep everyone on your team on the same page. Looking for a template to get your team started? Check out our Team Workshop Guide for Writing Incredible OKRs.
Join thousands of companies discovering more purposeful work with Koan.