What's Missing in Your Goals? 

If you've heard people talk about an OKR system, or KRAs, and you're wondering what that is, let us explain. These are initials for a leadership system, designed to yield better business results, focused on what is most significant for your business success. Sounds like a great idea, right? It's time to do it. 

Why OKRs?  

About 25-30 years ago, the best management practice for leaders was management by objectives, or MBOs. The concept was one of spending significant time and effort to identify specific leadership objectives, plans, and a level of accountability overall for getting things done. The focus was on the objectives, not the results. While the concept of setting strategic objectives was a great one, it was missing something - a clear picture of the results needed to reflect business success. The premise was that setting a strong plan would generate the right results. That wasn't exactly reality.  Many leaders considered planning as their work, not results. 

Enter OKRs about 20 years ago, starting in technology companies like Google and Intel. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results; KRA stands for Key Result Areas. Highly competitive and dynamic organizations struggled to achieve alignment and active movement in the industry amidst rapid growth until visionary leaders realized that they needed active team collaboration and transparency across the organization toward clear, foundational and aspirational objectives. A foundational objective is a business requirement. An aspirational objective is a stretch goal that would potentially be disruptive in the industry. This was the beginning of a true OKR system. Over the years, OKR's success has led to broader adoption, yet many organizations still lack execution of the basic principles: shared, aligned, priority objectives, and result accountability to each person, role, and department. It's interesting that one of the consistent reasons why employees leave organizations is because of a lack of clear role expectations and work alignment to the mission. It's time to change this through OKRs!

OKR Value Equation

An OKR system depends upon clear identification of 3-5 strategic objectives by the leaders, alignment of accountability for key results to each member of the organization, and an ongoing system of results monitoring weekly, monthly, and quarterly to ensure progressive results achievement. The hardest part of using OKRs is getting a reasonable number of the right objectives identified to focus on. Generally the best way to implement OKRs is through the senior leaders spending some time to get acquainted with the concept and use, and holding themselves accountable for up to six months or more. Once the senior leaders get comfortable with OKRs, then cascading them to the middle management team is next. Senior leaders are typically early adopters of the process as they see the value, while the middle management group is often more conflicted with expectations from their team and senior leaders. Once the system is deployed to the leaders, then alignment to the workforce is actually pretty straightforward, as long as there is a system to visualize and reward progress transparently across the organization. The true value of the OKR system is through aligned collaborative performance toward the most important strategic objectives. Most organizations achieve 10-30% or more performance gains as a result of the OKR system. Think about that potential in your organization!

Small Business Benefits

Using an OKR system as a small business offers as many benefits as it does for a larger business, by helping the leader, owner or partners to be on the same page, and hold themselves accountable for key results. When the responsibility for effective business operations and growth falls on a single leader, who holds the leader accountable? An OKR system can. Wearing many hats, as most business leaders must, makes it easy to lose focus or set the performance bar too low. An OKR system creates a clear focus on what's most important, especially when supported by a business advisor or consultant. Most OKR systems are cloud-based software tools with performance dashboards that are viewable by the advisor or consultant, to boost accountability and just-in-time solutions. Another significant small business benefit is the transparency with the work team, to harness more productivity and empowerment. When an owner reflects confidence in the team, and shares key business results, it boosts employee morale and retention. Organizations that have a clear plan simply achieve more, and that creates business success.

A Digital OKR Solution

Those who have been using an OKR system for a number of years swear by a cloud-based transparent software solution as key to success. While there are a number of different OKR options in the market, our recommendation is to find one that isn't too complex, that delivers a great value as you grow. Key features that we recommend include: 1) the ability to easily set and enter annual and quarterly objectives at the organizational, leader and department/team levels, 2) dashboards and status updates at all levels, 3) measurable key results for each objective, 4) feedback, communication and recognition elements to reward progress to targets, 5) and weekly plans to capture the key activities needed to achieve results. For example, if a car sales business were using OKRs, the sales team would have OKRs focused upon the number of sales per month, per quarter and annually, perhaps by model or brand. In addition, the sales team would have weekly plans to achieve certain levels of contacts, follow-ups, or referrals, in order to build the opportunity to make monthly and quarterly sales targets. A dashboard would reflect the performance of the sales team, visible to the manager, while the sales team could also see the targets and progress of the service department, as key to organizational revenues, customer satisfaction and retention levels. As team members see each other's progress, they can explore creative solutions to achieve targets. Teamwork works!

Getting Started  

As you consider the advantages of identifying the most important business objectives and bringing them to life, there's not a better time to get started with OKRs! Fortunately, there are a number of systems on the market that are quite good. You just need to determine which one might work best for you, based upon the size and scale of your organization, your team's maturity with leadership accountability, and your budget. Pursuit of Excellence (POE) Digital Solutions services can help make this easier through an initial meeting with your leaders, to identify these elements, and recommend a best fit system for your needs. Find out more at the link below.

About POE Digital Solutions

Pursuit of Excellence Digital Solutions (POE-DS) is a division of Pursuit of Excellence LLC, a business management consulting agency that focuses upon helping leaders to be more effective, advance strategic performance, and achieve high-level performance results. POE-DS offers a variety of state-of-the-art solution packages for different business technology needs, including an OKR setup, coaching and monitoring service, and a suite of enterprise relationship programs to meet the dynamic  needs of small and mid-sized organizations. If you or your leaders need to advance your digital strategy for competitive positioning, POE-DS should be your first stop. If your organization is not ready to get on board with digital solutions yet, consider that your competition has already been moving there...Let's connect now!

Dawn Garcia is Principal and Founder of Pursuit of Excellence LLC, an independent business management consulting firm specializing in service-based businesses; delivering leadership, strategy and execution expertise. Experience the Excellence Driven® System for your business, and achieve the results you need! Every business needs help at some point; great business leaders actually get help when needed, realizing greater returns. When you need help, consult the experts. Our success is your success!