Setting effective goals doesn’t come naturally. It takes time and effort to write technically sound OKRs. But it doesn’t matter how well your OKRs are written if you don’t have the supporting structure to make them happen. You need governance and sound structures or processes to ensure that you can drive the things that matter around OKRs: accountability, alignment, and focus. Most importantly, this work needs to come from leadership who demonstrate accountability and practice what they preach!
Accountability
Setting up an OKRs program does not magically increase accountability – or alignment or focus, for that matter. When it comes to accountability, you need two supporting structures in place.
The first supporting structure is negotiation. Good OKRs come out of a negotiation process. After a team gets together and writes OKRs, they should be shared with the boss and there should be a good discussion about:
- Do these OKRs reflect the strategy of the organization?
- Do they demonstrate an understanding of where the company wants to go?
- Are we clearly signaling what our contribution is?
- Is the level of stretch appropriate?
It’s commonly said that OKRs should be written bottoms up, but they also need-top down discussion to ensure that you arrive at something that will provide business value.
The second supporting structure to ensure accountability is the retrospective. People tend to set OKRs and then forget about them. At the end of the quarter, retrospectives are vital. It’s not just reporting out scores on the OKR, but looking at what was learned about the business. What happened? Why did it happen? Did our OKRs demonstrate value to the company?
Alignment
Companies commonly adopt OKRs because they want to foster alignment in the organization. However, achieving alignment is also a common struggle companies encounter in their OKR programs.
There are two types of alignment: strategic and horizontal. Strategic refers to how the impact of an objective aligns strategically. This is vertical alignment, and the negotiation process helps here. Horizontal alignment refers to alignment with other teams. It’s about working better cross-functionally. Employees typically feel like they can rely on their own boss, direct reports, and team members, but their confidence in the reliability of other departments plunges.
When writing OKRs, carefully document dependencies. In other words, determine who in the organization can help with an OKR, and what specific assistance is needed. Then have a meeting with the department and talk about the dependencies and determine whether or not they have the bandwidth to help. If the other department says yes, great. If they say no, then your case is not hopeless. Simply escalate it to the next level of management or leadership.
Focus
The big underlying theme of OKRs is focus. OKRs are not a contest to show how busy you are. The whole point of OKRs is to say, what’s important right now? What’s a big win for us to focus on?
The key to writing focused OKRs is to take the time to write good, value-driving OKRs. The more thought and discipline that’s put into writing a specific goal, the more committed the writer will be to attain it. When an OKR is quick and vague, you aren’t committed to it, and you don’t know where to start to attain it. If the focus is a problem for your organization, have people write one well-thought-out OKR for the quarter.
But what does this look like from leadership?
Accountable leaders clearly communicate their goals and OKRs to their team in order to foster alignment and team focus. As a leader, it’s crucial to implement accountability, alignment, and focus throughout your team in order to foster team success – good leadership closes the loop between strategy, people, and results! There are quite a few ways to demonstrate your own accountability and practice what you preach including:
- Goals
- Performance management
- Team building
- Trust
- Integrity
- Communication
We hope the tips and insights in this blog post inspired you to further align your team through accountable structures! To learn more about how Betterworks can help you enable accountability for your teams, check out our website for more!
