It is a management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization. This goal-setting framework is used by Google, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and many other successful companies.Objective: a short, inspirational, and achievable statement that describes WHAT you want to achieve. Objectives are a “vaccine against fuzzy thinking and fuzzy execution.”Key Results: succinct, specific, and measurable actions that map out HOW you will achieve your Objectives. KRs are aggressive but realistic.

The Meaning Of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

People who choose their destination will own a deeper awareness of what it takes to get there.Giving people a chance to contribute to setting OKRs within their functions can help increase buy-in, give a sense of ownership, and help them understand what it takes to achieve the goals. Leaders need to find the right balance between bottom-up and top-down goal-setting when using OKRs.

Involve Your People in Setting OKRs

OKRs surface your primary goals. They channel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.OKRs help your organization prioritize the highest impact initiatives. They also align people across your entire organization, which creates unity despite people working on very different parts of the business.

Goal Setting

Goals may cause systematic problems in organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behaviour, increased risk-taking, decreased cooperation and decreased motivation.The wrong goals can be detrimental to an organization. The OKR process helps you set the right goals, but it must be used carefully. Sending people in the wrong direction or incentivizing the wrong behaviour through goals can be wildly harmful to an organization.

The Danger Of Goals

When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.’

A manager’s first role is the personal one. It’s the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence, and the creation of a community. Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.Outside of setting the right goals and getting buy-in from their teams, managers need to focus on relationships. They need to make sure their people are developing and happy with their path.

How to Stop Being Embarrassed

Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

OKRs are a shared language for execution. They clarify expectations: What do we need to get done (and fast), and who’s working on it? They keep employees aligned, vertically and horizontally.OKRs unify the organization with a shared language and clarity about expectations.

A Shared Language for Execution

Feedback helps people understand how others perceive them and their work. It’s naturally opinion-based but is often grounded in the experiences we have with colleagues. Managers need to learn how to give constructive feedback to their employees in a way that they can absorb and action that feedback.

Feedback

Good ideas without proper execution are useless. To see ideas come to life and drive value for your organization, you need a systematic approach to prioritizing and executing the best ideas.Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a powerful goal-setting framework for organizations. This system has been used by countless successful companies to direct efforts and grow over the long term.

Focus on Execution

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting. People want to find meaning in their work. They want to know how their hours contribute directly to the mission of the organization. It’s the responsibility of the leader to explain why certain goals have been set, and how individuals working on their goals are contributing to the overall vision.

Communicating the 'Why'

OKRs need to include a healthy and continuous performance management system. This can be done with the CFR framework.Conversations: an authentic, richly textured exchange between manager and contributor, aimed at driving performance.Feedback: bidirectional or networked communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide future improvement.Recognition: expressions of appreciation to deserving individuals for contributions of allCFRs help promote transparency, accountability, empowerment, and teamwork.

Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition (CFRs)

#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

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#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

JEFF WEINER

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