Goals & OKRs flow throughout the organization to ensure purpose, mission, and strategy alignment.
Why Cascading Goals & OKRS at Axelerant?
As past goal setting and tracking has have been disjointed, Axelerant’s Axelerant's clarity across the organization needs to be improved, especially in helping people know how they fit into and relate to the organization. With Leapsome Goals, we can readily create a picture connecting people, groups, and Axelerant.
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Strategic goals are derived from Axelerant’s Axelerant's purpose and mission.
Organizational objectives descend from Axelerant’s Axelerant's strategic goals.
Departmental objectives relate directly to organizational objectives.
Group (team) objectives correlate with departmental or organizational objectives.
Individual objectives relate directly to group objectives.
Note: An objective might be the desired outcome of a level above.
Understanding Goals & OKRS
How Goals & OKRS Relate
Goals are a kind of long-term strategy or guideline. They explain what Axelerant wants to achieve and are usually long-term and global.
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🎯 We’ll make progress in pursuit of [OBJECTIVE] by achieving [KEY RESULTS].
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Objectives Defined
Objectives, or what, represent Axelerant's purpose toward an organizational direction or a mission-supporting goal.
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Objectives build transparency and alignment, spreading the intent of working towards the same goal across the organization.
Warning: Objectives shouldn't be a simple expansion of something we've already mastered–they should be groundbreaking.
Key Results Defined
Key results, or how, are pieces of the objective's bigger picture. They tell us when teams are going in the right direction and how far we still have to push.
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Key results must be quantifiable, measurable, and balanced. They should guide, fuel, and not compromise our audaciousness.
Warning: Key results shouldn't be easy to reach; they should be meaningful enough to be celebrated when achieved. E.g., Is it worth pushing to #celebrate or #learn?
OKR Best Practices
Be open to recalculating.
Goals don’t don't always go as planned, and there’s there's no shame in reevaluating objectives and key results during an OKR cycle. We may realize that a set of key results was unrealistic or not audacious enough. We may find that an entire group of OKRs doesn’t doesn't move the needle for company-wide goals as expected.
Be open to learning as a team; don’t don't wait until the end of a cycle to ask for support or raise red flags.
Discuss results & focus on learning.
Each OKR cycle should invite questioning and curiosity. Encourage all managers and contributors to evaluate key results when an OKR cycle approaches its end.
Meet as a team to discuss results and learnings, aligning all stakeholders as they create more refined OKRs for the next period.
Involve team members in creating the next OKRs.
After agreeing upon individual and department-specific OKRs for a new cycle, schedule a retrospective and planning workshop with more stakeholders for more transparency and an even smoother alignment of cascading goals across the organization.
Expectations of Leaders, Managers, and Team Members
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1. Define company-level goals.
Who: Directors and up, including CXOs.
Starting with a clear purpose and priorities for the year ahead /wiki/spaces/AH/pages/3915776001, we translate those into three or four core company goals.
Company-level or parent goals provide the starting point for increasing the granularity of OKRs that aligns align the entire organization via a cascading goal methodology.
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Acquisition
Branding
Hiring
Revenue
2. Discuss group-specific contributions.
Who: Department managers and up.
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For example, the marketing department could support hiring goals by working with People Operations to launch an improved careers page and promote the team member experience across social platforms. Marketing could also support revenue goals by driving more sales leads to our service representatives.
3. Set a quarterly timeframe.
Who: Team managers and up.
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Goal cycles with a quarterly cadence are easily divisible into 13 weeks. You can aim to progress by 10% each week, plus a 2–3 week grace period to get started or overcome setbacks.
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4. Choose 3-5 objectives.
Who: Managers and their teams.
Between three and five objectives per OKR period is a reasonable amount to keep each department and team stimulated without feeling overwhelmed. With fewer, goals it may feel limiting and not quite motivating. With more, we risk focusing on too much at once and not achieving anything.
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What changes can we make to move Axelerant forward? Pinpoint changes that must be made to progress the strategic purpose and mission.
Why are these changes significant now? Evaluate the urgency and relevance of the goals. When the importance of an objective is not explainable, it's probably not a priority.
What challenges are preventing us from achieving our mission? Identify every obstacle in the way to assess how realistic our objectives are.
What's our team's role in helping achieve this objective? Start breaking down organizational objectives into the team and individual ones.
5. Break each objective into key results & assign ownership.
Who: Managers and their teams.
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Consider a team's size and the objective's scope to structure an appropriate challenge. Avoid easy, impossible, too few, or too many key results that create distraction rather than concentrated effort.
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What's our starting point? When having more than one objective, we must decide which to tackle first. We can do so based on importance or what's most doable.
Which are our highest priority initiatives? Consider which areas deserve more attention than others. We might focus on one objective because it's more challenging or requires fewer resources.
What is each team member responsible for? Help the team organize its initiatives and break down team objectives into individual ones.
Remember: OKRs must align with Axelerant's goals. Although their people scope team OKRs are scoped by their people, those OKRs require organizational alignment validation by the performance management team.
Bonus: In assigning ownership of team OKRs, you may create individualized goals and OKRs that extend support toward Axelerant’s Axelerant's growth and purpose.
6. Track progress & recognize achievements.
Who: All stakeholders.
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Keep OKRs in shape by regularly monitoring progress, making your goals an ongoing conversation, and recognizing every accomplishment. Praising team members and giving constructive feedback are excellent ways to engage everyone and keep OKR’s OKR's potential in mind.
Schedule OKR check-ins with your team at least once a month using the Check-In–Goals/OKR meeting template. During the check-in, the team can review results and roadblocks, increase accountability, and work on solutions together.
More on https://www.leapsome.com/playbooks/how-to-run-okr-check-in-meeting.
Using Leapsome for Goals & OKRS
Leapsome's Goals module allows Axelerant to smoothly set, track, and align intent and effort across the organization. While goals are the end target, OKRs are the framework to hit them unitedly.
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Visibly Aligning Goals & OKRS Across the Organization
Top company goals have related annual company OKRs, inspiring sequential quarterly OKRs supported by the team and individual OKRs. Conversely, an individual OKR must align with a team OKR that must align with a company OKR that must help an Axelerant long-term strategy or guideline.
For example, let’s consider Axelerant’s let's consider Axelerant's goal of enjoyable customer experiences as a 2024 objective with sequential quarterly objectives of reliably knowing what a customer thinks of Axelerant and proactively adapting to customer needs.
Those quarterly company objectives are jointly related to Sales and Delivery efforts.
For Delivery’s Delivery's objective, reliably knowing…, it might have the key results of selecting a customer survey practice and selecting a customer feedback owner.
A delivery team’steam's objective of selecting a customer survey practice might break down into the key results of research, assessment, selection, implementation, and retrospection.
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Axelerant's mission alignment is efficiently and transparently visualized using Leapsome's goal tree.
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Got a Question?
Visit the FAQ–Goals & OKRs DRAFT.
Ask the @performance-management-team via #guild-performance-mgmt.
References
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
https://www.leapsome.com/playbooks/how-to-implement-okrs-objectives-key-results
https://www.leapsome.com/blog/a-step-by-step-guide-to-starting-with-okrs-from-an-okr-expert
https://leapsome.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4414398447889-The-difference-between-goals-OKRs
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