How OKRs inspire

And help build teams

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are an amazing way to inspire people by giving a clear and shared vision of what success means to the organization. They are a tool to unlock motivation, collaboration and creativity.

Typically, OKRs help leadership clarify what is important and also facilitate alignment, collaboration and self-organization. They provide a framework for teams to understand their accountability and empower them to seek the best ways to contribute to the Objectives measured by the Key Results.

The brilliant thing though, is that OKRs don’t only foster teamwork of the product teams. They also help the leadership team to be more cohesive. Today I will discuss one of the best examples in my recent coaching history.

Our organization is heavily investing time and effort in working with OKRs. To achieve this, we need to do many things. One of them is training people. As a part of the training, we create small teams that all need to work on a case study. This case study starts with the following situation description:

A financial company has the following strategic priorities:

• one target platform

• geo expansion

• "getting better”

Currently, teams are being rewarded as follows:

• Sales receive bonuses based on deals closed

• Product and Technology is measured by features delivered according to a roadmap

• Operations are measured by platform stability

• Management is rewarded by "how their department is doing"

We ask them to work on the case study after a huge chunk about the why and what of OKRs. Our first question to them is what could go wrong in the current situation and they quickly point towards the unclear strategic priorities and conflicting incentives (amongst other issues).

Then we ask each team to spend 8 minutes to think of possible objectives for this organization. Their results are typically factually correct, but also bland. Here are some examples of this week’s training:

• Onboarding clients cross-country on a single highly reliable platform

• All customers are on the target platform and are satisfied

• Alignment on defining common goals/roadmap

• To make all the departments see and contribute to the bigger picture (company perspective)

We received feedback that they found it difficult to be concise and also indicated they didn’t feel a connection to their objective proposal.

This is where we spend 2 minutes to show them some great slogans they all know:

• Just Do It. by Nike

• Think Different. by Apple

• To put a man on the moon - by J.F. Kennedy

• an other examples

We acknowledged that the first two are marketing slogans, but they are more too. They express what Nike and Apple wanted to be. They wanted (and in Nike’s case, still want, as they still use it) their people to “Just Do It” and “Think Different”.

Then we challenged the four teams to try to rephrase their objectives with what we discussed in mind. The results were amazing. They came up with:

• Global reach, local touch, always improving

• One Platform for All

• Get Out of Silo

• Reach beyond the horizon

In merely twenty minutes, the 4 teams constructed inspirational objectives from scratch, without knowing each other up front. When we asked them how they felt about the objectives now, they were without exception enthusiastic.

But what one of them said next, was even better: “The second iteration, we felt like a team”. The best was, that others from different teams confirmed they had the same experience. The creation of meaningful and inspiring objectives made them a team.

In less than half an hour, we established that:

• Every team in the training had an inspiring Objective to use for the remainder of the training

• They understood the importance of clear, concise and inspiring Objectives.

• They knew the difference between Objectives and Key Results (which help to measure your progress towards the Objective).

• They felt the emotional impact of working on something meaningful and how it can help build team cohesion.

Sure, the objectives could be even better if we had given them more time. Our philosophy though is to spend as much time as we need for them to get it, so they can create magic in the real world.

The great experience I had this week made me realize that the inspirational impact of OKRs starts from the moment people create them together. I realize, indeed, that I saw the same during the OKRs definition workshop of our management board. With that, OKRs are even more impactful than I already knew.

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