At Koan, we think a lot about what makes for a healthy “heartbeat” inside teams and companies, and about how adding the right set of regular disciplines actually unlocks creativity and autonomy.
Last week, well-known venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a great post “The Heartbeat” about the rhythm and cadence that great CEOs set inside their companies with goals/OKRs, regular product releases, and more. The idea resonates strongly — before we settled on “Koan”, we played around with both a heartbeat and metronome as being metaphors and name inspirations for the company. A metronome marks the time for playing music, and even one of the great acts of musical creativity (jazz musicians improvising together) would fall apart without a common beat. At Koan, we think a lot about what makes for a healthy “heartbeat” inside teams and companies, and about how adding the right set of regular disciplines actually unlocks creativity and autonomy.
There’s potentially a lot of ground to cover, but I’ll home in on how the heartbeat concept relates to having a successful goals / OKRs process.
Checking in on the progress of your critical goals every week is an important positive behavior and at the core of how to use goals to set the cadence of your team. Don’t be like most teams and only formally review your OKRs once a quarter (I kid you not, this is what most people do).
We believe (surprise, surprise) in the value of using a dedicated tool like Koan to run your goals review. However, you can make-do with a Google spreadsheet or the like.
By doing this behavior every week, you’ll find yourself automatically asking some incredibly important questions… Are we working on the most important things? Where are we having problems and who needs help? How do we improve next week? The weekly reviews will also become the living history of your goals and will help you understand over time the patterns around success and failure.
If you’re not already running a formal weekly goals review, we think you’ll be surprised at how effectively it can set the tempo for your team! In future posts, we’ll dig into other behaviors we’ve seen great leaders use to set their team’s pulse.
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