Key Results are how you will achieve your objective.
They are the steps that will measure and define your success.
Key Results help shape decisions about where you’ll spend your time and energy. They identify the results that matter in pursuing your objective.
Key results must be measurable and objective, and they must have deadlines. At the end of the time-frame, you must be able to say you achieved or did not achieve your KR, or quantify to what extent you achieved it.
If you already have KPIs, use them for Key Results and tie them to the larger overall objective they achieve.
If your objective is to be the best at what you are, your key results might be to benchmark your key performance indicators (sales, revenue, units), create and execute a customer satisfaction survey, and have a series of brainstorming meetings with your team to create innovative offerings and improve results. These are all steps you can say at the end of the quarter that you did or did not achieve.
If your objective has to do with skill acquisition or learning, your key results might include the effects of improving a skill. For example, if you are working on impulse control, an emotional intelligence skill, you might try a key result like: “find at least one moment every day where I resist making a snarky comment,” or “allow one beat of silence after others talk to make sure I’m not interrupting.” If you track your behavior daily, these become objective, measurable results. It’s how you reality test your efforts for improvement.
Each time you check in on your OKR dashboard and update progress, you will be updating your key results.
Ready to start writing your OKRs? Download this Objective Sheet to put it all together.
