Honest assessment helps you learn and grow.

Taking time to look at how far you’ve come will help you stay focused on where you want to go next. Being honest about what you did or didn’t do, owning the responsibility and recognizing the achievement, is crucial for staying engaged over the long term to achieve something that will change your life or the lives of your customers.

Grading your OKR has nothing to do with judging and is meaningless by itself. The grade is not good or bad. It simply indicates how close you are to getting what you want, and how much farther you have to go.

The grade helps you decide if it is time to learn, re-commit yourself, adjust the KR, or celebrate. It’s really just a tool to stop and reflect on where you want to go from here.

OKRs are not a substitute or subset for performance reviews. What you are trying to do is not the same as what you earn or how you are recognized.

If you work to achieve your OKRs, you will be doing things that are valuable for your organization or your target audience. The visibility and impact you achieve using OKRs should lead to greater rewards from your organization or customer base. But these are separate discussions and processes.

Grading Basics

Generally, people grade OKRs on a 1.0 scale.

1. Committed objectives must reach 1.0. Committed objectives are defined as goals that you commit to rearranging your time and priorities to achieve. They are not optional for performance.

2. Aspirational objectives are a success if they score 0.7 or better. This may still be a result that is larger than if you had aimed for a lower objective. A score of .7 for an aspirational goal means you still have a ways to go but you’re pushing in the right direction.

3. Ask yourself: Can I reasonably expect to achieve a score of 1.0 on all the key results but still not achieve the intent of the objective? If so, add or rework the key results until their successful completion guarantees that the objective is also successfully completed.

4. Committed objectives that do not reach a 1.0 will generate a discussion about understanding what happened so that you can improve your ability to get what you want in the future.

5. Aspirational OKRs by design exceed your ability to execute in a given quarter. They should inform your priorities and decisions about where to spend your time, energy, and resources. Expect to score less than 1 for aspirational OKRs, and to celebrate big when you reach or exceed one.

Aspirational OKRs and their associated priorities should remain on your OKR list until they are completed, carrying them forward from quarter to quarter as necessary. Dropping them from the OKR list because of lack of progress is a mistake, as it disguises persistent problems of prioritization, resource availability, or a lack of understanding of the problem/solution. The point is to learn, focus, and find what you need to succeed.