OKRs powerfully align goals over time and throughout organizations.

OKRs are a simple tool that can have powerful effects on alignment. Whether you want to align actions over the long term, or throughout an organization, OKRs clarify what’s important so every team member can pull in the same direction.

When management creates a goal that is clear, communicated, and used actively as the barometer for all effort, people in the organization naturally want to help. An inspirational goal that changes lives increases a desire for helpfulness and effort. It also reduces busyness, meaningless activity, and noise. Politicking becomes less important than results. Getting through your email is less desirable than keeping your KR on track. Transparent OKRs at every level free people to say no to anything that isn’t helpful.

Long Term OKRs

Stating a long term goal can help you break down the steps, quarter by quarter, to getting it done. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, use them to feel organized and energized. They will keep you inspired while you learn and identify what it’s going to take to achieve your goal.

No matter what your long term goal is, articulating it clearly and sticking to it over a few years can have powerful focusing effects. You will know more clearly and earlier in the process what is important. It will help you identify the foundational steps and decisions that need to be made.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur with an idea for a business, you will want to look ahead a few years and define how your world or your customers’s world could be different if you found a way to overcome most obstacles.

If you want to write a book, OKR’s help you break down the process over time to keep you on track as you do the planning and research, write each chapter, organize notes and appendixes, and build an audience that will receive the book.

If you have seen John Doerr’s TED Talk, think about Sindar Pichai, the Googler who wanted to build the best browser, what we now know as Chrome (see snippet below). The objective remained the same, and the KR was expressed in active users.

By staying focused on the features that would attract the audience he wanted, he built his audience from less than 10 million the first year, to 37 million the second year, to 111 million the third year. OKRs helped him learn what was working, focus on the features that attracted users, get buy-in from others and dedicate the resources to deliver for his audience. And the audience rewarded him. It’s about impact.

Alignment Throughout Organizations

There is more to say about using OKRs to achieve alignment throughout organizations than I can say here. I will only stress that if you are looking to motivate a team to achieve something meaningful, focus their best efforts, avoid non-productive activities, and pull powerfully in the same direction to achieve a common goal, you should be looking at OKRs.

When upper management articulates a clear goal, dedicates time and resources to achieve it, inspires employees to own their part and use their best efforts to contribute, the effect can be surprising. It’s like tug of rope. Everyone pulling at the time in the same direction, creates a powerful force. Amazing things can happen.

When upper management makes their OKRs radically transparent to everyone in the organization, individuals take note. They begin to consider how they can help their bosses get more done. When someone has a good idea, it can bubble up and become a new normal, communicated across teams. Good ideas spread and empower more people.

High level OKRs encourage individual contributors to take risks. If the culture is appropriately focused on coaching for achievement, there are no negative consequences for something that doesn’t work.

Managers recognize that trials are important to finding new ways to break through. They begin to actively encourage their team to try new things, learn, and try again knowing what you know now. There is less fear, more courage. Less stress, more effort. Less blame, more progress.

OKRs can help a company update its culture to develop more high-performing individuals.

If your manager or boss is not inspiring you, there is no reason why you can’t adopt OKRs yourself and begin inspiring yourself to perform better and get better results.  See my No Team, No Problem page.