What Are We Asking OKRs to Fix?

I once put financial incentives in place for a sales team around implementation work. The more hours they billed, the more they earned. Seems straightforward enough, except those incentives were in direct conflict with what our product and engineering teams were trying to do. And of course the sales team wanted to bill more hours. I'd given them a very good reason to! It's an uncomfortable thing to look back on and realize you helped create the problem.

That story came up when Mathias and I recorded our latest episode on OKRs, objectives and key results. I've been through so many versions of this process: annual planning, quarterly goals, department goals, all the way down to individual goals. It's supposed to add up to everyone working toward the same thing. But sometimes we hadn't really agreed on what that thing was. We'd gotten very specific about the numbers while we were still pretty fuzzy on the strategy, and somehow expected the process to sort that out for us.

The irony, at least in my experience, is that OKRs seem to work best in companies where people already trust each other and understand where they're going. When those things are missing, you can end up spending a lot of time proving you're doing your job. Meanwhile, the things that help a team work well together, like building relationships, learning, or helping a colleague, get less attention because they're harder to put a number on. I think that's a real loss, and I've seen how easily it happens.

I still think shared goals can help. These days, though, I'd start with two or three things we want to work on, agree on them with the people doing the work, and talk through where we'll need each other's help. Then come back in thirty days and ask how it went. Did we make progress? Did we accidentally encourage something we didn't want? That second question is one I wish I'd asked sooner about those sales incentives. It's easy to get frustrated with how people respond before looking at what we asked them to do.

Mathias and I get into all of this in S1E10: OKRs, including our own attempts to make these frameworks work. If you've ever finished a planning cycle wondering whether all that effort actually helped your team, I think you'll recognize a few things.

• #Leadership
• #WorkplaceCulture