In this article we consider how to empower teams to achieve OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) as well as pitfalls to avoid.
In Part 1 we met Jay, who had decided to run a marathon and was setting some OKRs to help him achieve his goals around health and wellbeing.
Now Jay has another goal in his sights – he’s going to seek sponsorship for running the marathon to raise money in memory of his dad. But first he must get his team on board.
The only problem is that this involves getting his teenage daughters off the sofa – and off their phones!
Jay has a think about what OKRs to set.
For Kat (who plays for the school hockey team and is the “IT-savvy one”) he sets the following OKRs:
For Abby (the dreamy, “artistic one”), he goes with the following:
Jay is storing up trouble here!
As we saw in Part 1, Key Results should communicate where you want to get to over a specified time period, and they should be ambitious. But Jay knows the girls have busy and complicated social lives and he isn’t sure how long they will be able to keep up their fundraising efforts. So, he’s just going to see how they get on. He hasn’t set an overall fundraising goal, to be met by a specified date.
What he’s actually done here is set the girls a series of tasks (calling them Key Results) in the hope that this might move them towards a vague, unspecified goal.
Jay worries that Kat isn’t very creative so he hovers over her as she sets up the fundraising page, suggesting what photos and wording she should include.
He asks his wife, Sally, to supervise the baking and make sure Abby doesn’t get carried away and spend too much on the ingredients. (Abby isn’t impressed.)
Jay calls a team meeting after the first week.
Kat’s fundraising page is up and running and three people have signed up – Mum, Gran and Auntie Sue have pledged £50 each.
However, the website charges a fee of 7%. Abby helpfully points out that they would have been better off just asking Mum, Gran and Auntie Sue to hand over the cash. Kat gives her one of her withering looks, but admits she just went with the first fundraising site that came up on an internet search and hasn’t researched the pros and cons of different sites. She doesn’t admit that she thinks it’s “lame” to share posts about Dad running a marathon…
But progress against her Key Results is looking fine - the amount raised in the first month is high (thanks to Mum, Gran and Auntie Sue) and she’s set up her Twitter account to automatically share the link 20 times per week (mostly in the middle of the night, when nobody will see it).
Abby held her first bake sale last Friday after school but hardly anybody came along, and most people didn’t have any cash on them anyway. She ended up selling all the cakes to Gran afterwards at a fixed price of £50.
Her progress towards her Key Results is therefore looking okay for this first month, but she won’t be able to replicate this every time (without seriously affecting Gran’s waistline, anyway.)
Jay is running into problems with the task-based Key Results he has set.
They are not focused on top-level outcomes and so the girls are approaching them as a box-ticking exercise. On a superficial level, it looks like they’re making progress, but they have burned through the low-hanging fruit (Mum, Gran and Auntie Sue!) and will quickly run out of steam unless they find new ways of reaching potential sponsors.
Crucially, task-based OKRs can be overly restrictive. They deprive teams of the autonomy they need to innovate and optimise.
Jay realises that the OKRs aren’t inspiring the girls. They don’t communicate his vision. They don’t tell the story of what he’s trying to do.
He needs to win the hearts and minds of his team! So he reframes his Objective:
It’s a slightly scary Objective since they’ll need to raise a LOT of money. But the girls put down their phones – they’re finally interested. They explore the charity’s website and find an adorable dog – Larry - they’d love to sponsor.
Kat goes away and researches fundraising sites properly – she doesn’t like the idea of the money being eaten up in fees when it could be going towards sponsoring Larry.
Abby tries harder with her bake sales. She makes a poster with a photograph of Larry with his dog friends at the charity. She writes some heartfelt words about what a disability assistance dog might have meant to Grandpa, who was in a wheelchair for the last few years of his life.
Jay holds another team meeting in a couple of weeks. But things are not going as planned!
Kat’s fundraising page is being shared plenty of times (she’s even sharing it during the day now) but nobody is signing up.
Abby made £23 from her last bake sale, which is even less than the first time. Abby explains that nobody ever has any money on them, and they’re always in a rush after school.
Jay realises there’s still a problem here. Although he’s set an inspiring overarching Objective, the Key Results he’s set for Abby and Kat aren’t aligned.
Abby’s bake sales are being run in a vacuum - independently from Jay’s marathon efforts and the fundraising web page. Kat’s fundraising page isn’t taking off – she doesn’t have Abby’s skills of creating inspiring content, so people just scroll past.
Abby and Kat are working independently to follow their own goals – the task-based OKRs that Jay has set for them. They are working in silos oblivious to what the other is doing.
It is crucial to make sure that goals are aligned, company-wide.
In my Insight Paper, Silos: Why Focusing on Vision (not communication) is the Answer, I consider the example of a sales team who promises a new client an amount of the technical team’s time in order to clinch a new deal, which means that the technical team gets pulled away from their own team goal (product development) in order to fulfil the sales team’s promise. Resentment, frustration and stress inevitably build, leading to disconnection and further entrenchment of silos.
Melissa Perri’s excellent book,Escaping the Build Trap, considers this type of scenario in more detail.
Jay realises he must step back and stop micro-managing. He sets new Key Results which are aligned, measurable and time-bound – Abby and Kat must raise £3000 in sponsorship in the next three months.
Kat and Abby respond in unison: “Are you actually joking?”
He shuts them in a room with takeaway pizza and cold drinks, and goes out for a run. The best thing he can do now is to get out of the way.
The girls realise the only way they can do this is to work together.
Kat (who Abby now refers to as “the Tech Team”) creates some QR codes for Abby to put on her posters. People can use their phones to scan the QR codes and go straight to the fundraising page.
If people donate £5 on the fundraising page, they get a “free” cake. Abby can now raise £5 per cake instead of selling them for 50p! People don’t need cash, and Abby decides that if the person shares, on social media, that they made a donation, they get a free chocolate-covered marshmallow – this will help Kat’s efforts to raise visibility of the page online.
Kat also makes the sneaky suggestion of holding the bake sales on a Saturday morning, after the school sports matches. This will open up the fundraising to people from other schools – and parents who have come along to spectate. And she knows from her experience on the hockey team that players will be starving after playing their matches and more likely to pay £5 for a piece of cake.
Mum realises she doesn’t need to hover over Abby. Instead, she asks what resources Abby needs (more baking equipment, more money for ingredients.)
Abby (now known as the “Content Queen”) helps Kat with the layout of the fundraising page. She adds pictures of Grandpa, and of Larry the dog, and some inspiring wording. Kat is much happier to share the page now that all photos of Dad in his running gear have been deleted!
Teams will self-organise and figure out the best way to achieve a common goal – as long as you give them the autonomy to get on with it.
Communication between teams is important, but this is something that will happen organically when their goals are properly aligned with each other.
This leads to cross-pollination of ideas, collaboration, and innovation. And ultimately, more efficiency and productivity.
At the next team meeting, Jay checks in on the girls’ progress towards their new Key Result (raising £3,000 by the end of three months).
Kat’s progress is looking very healthy now that she is no longer embarrassed to share the fundraising page, and its new content is inspiring people (not just family) to donate.
Abby is also doing fantastically. She’s doing a bake sale every Saturday now – there’s no shortage of hungry sports players.
The girls keep fundraising for all they’re worth. Jay trains harder…
Jay – eventually – chose brave, exciting OKRs that inspired his team and told the story of where he wanted this venture to go.
They are now entering the space where that story just might come true.
If you’d like to talk in more detail about how to set OKRs that will improve innovation, efficiency, productivity, morale and ultimately profitably in your business and how they fit with your KPIs, contact Matt Little at Blue Ocean Insight.