Objectives and Key Results

Dec 28, 2020 15:03 · 561 words · 3 minute read OKR Team Leadership

At the end of every year the topic performance review is getting more important, since obviously they are done in this time. During the last year I’ve felt, that extended remote work has its own implications on performance reviews or continuous feedback loops in general.

Sidenote: Philipp Hauer wrote a very nice article about the “Team Manager’s Toolkit for 1-on-1s” with a lot of very good and detailed thoughts about this topic.

However the common approach of setting yearly goals somehow bugs me. Each person defines yearly goals with his manager and sometimes it is even tied to compensation or monetary bonuses. This leads to very conservative goals which also aren’t agile at all.

I only recently read about OKR for goal setting and as a management system for leading teams. OKR as in “Objectives and Key Results” was first introduced by Andy Grove during his time at Intel and later John Doerr used it within Google in its first years.

At whatmatters.com you can find a good introduction to OKR and a lot of further material and there is also a good video about this.

With SAFe 5.0 OKRs got added to the SAFe Framework as a mean to improve the connection between enterprise strategy and portfolio vision.

Positive Aspects

This method definitely has some advantages, else it would not be used that successfully within Google an other big companies. In any approach, it is important to look at and take into account the positive aspects without mindlessly following the approach.

OKR states five benefits of OKR, which are:

Focus
Alignment
Commitment
Tracking
Stretching

Below are some short thoughts about positive aspects of OKR.

Strategic Orientation

Due to the influence of the team members of the higher level goals, each member can identify himself with the goals and have an intrinsic motivation to reach the goals. This relates to the benefit of “Alignment”.

“The more alignment you have, the more autonomy you can grant”¹

Flexible

Conventional goals for performance reviews are often specified as yearly goals, whereas for OKR it is common to specify and check goals for each quarter. In agile environments where the work is adapted to the current requirements and conditions it may be not optimal to define goals at the start of the year, which may be invalidated very early on. Goals certainly can be marked as not relevant anymore, but this does not really favor such goal setting in general.

What to measure?

I want to set a goal, but how can you measure wether the goal has been reached? This sounds obvious, but thinking about how to measure success is often forgotten. This approach of defining “Key Results” forces you to pre-select certain criteria which can be measured, which in turn prompts you to pre-evaluate the potential benefits more precisely.

Don’t settle for mediocre goals

The last benefit of OKR is called “Stretching” and it relates to the kind of goals that are defined. Is this goal reachable easily or is it likely to fail? In environments where the goals is tied to compensation, it will most likely affect the goals to be more conservative. OKR are intended to “inherently push organizations to strive further”². OKR can help to set ambitious goals and achieve better results than common yearly goals.