Podcast Transcript 036 : You’re Using OKRs All Wrong — Here’s How to Get Your Team to Reach Their Goals

[00:00:00]

Michel: Hi everyone and welcome to Growth Leap. I'm your host, Michel Gagnon. We talked to pretty awesome business builders who are designing disruptive and meaningful companies.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Growth Leap. Today, I will walk you through a solo episode where I basically deep dive in a specific topic. Today I'm talking about OKRs and why you're probably using them wrong.

Michel: A few years ago, I finished a week completely exhausted. And later that night, I had a beer with a friend of mine who asked me why I was so tired and I completely blanked. I couldn't come up with a good answer. I was trying to remember everything I had done that week, but nothing really stood out. I remembered that it was a busy week though. But it felt a bit like I had spun my wheel for no reason. I got busy with [00:01:00] little tasks without achieving anything meaningful.

In other words, I hadn't made progress on any of my priorities. That's why I started to look for a way to stay focused, make sure that my team was too. And my fancy strategy decks from my management consulting years didn't help.

Having a north star metric is useful, but it does not always help with managing the team's daily grind. So I tried OKRs, but I felt there was something still missing.

And the problem is that most OKR frameworks focus on what you want to accomplish, but not how. Don't get me wrong. They're great for setting strategy and the direction. But they don't help you identify the tactical tasks that will get those things done.

And I think the real stumbling block is not necessarily the strategies or the OKRs, but how these things align with the daily tasks of your team. And that's where I believe most OKR frameworks [00:02:00] fall short.

When we started using Notion, I saw an opportunity to right the wrongs in a way. And we didn't waste any time and started building a pretty cool template for our OKRS and our strategy. We build it for ourselves. But it works for any executive, managers, startup team or ambitious entrepreneur who really wants to synchronize daily work with big picture goals. There's no fluff.

We made sure of that. And we followed the Antoine de St-Exupery's view of perfection.

If you don't know Antoine de St-Exupery, he's the author of The Little Prince . And he wrote " Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing left to take away."

And this is critical for Notion, any tool that allows you to create and add a lot of things you need to make sure that you remove anything that is no longer needed.

To come up with a framework that actually works in real life, we borrowed [00:03:00] some elements of Andy Grove's OKR model and also Richard Rumelt's kernel of good strategy. If you haven't read the book, I strongly recommend that. It's called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. And then we connected them with projects and daily work. So, let me break it down for you.

The first part is called the diagnosis to know where to go. You and your team must have a shared understanding of the current reality. In his book principles, Ray Dalio encourages people to face reality and come up with solutions, instead of trying to put your heads into sand, he says, quote, " Embrace reality and deal with it."

your team must have a shared understanding of that reality. Otherwise you are living in your own little world full of different problems, requiring different solutions. Those of you believe let's say that you have a weak pipeline, we'll want to address that problem. Those who believe that [00:04:00] bugs in your product are the root cause of your stagnation will want to work on quality and delivery. The diagnosis explains in a few sentences, your current challenges and where you want to go. You cannot come up with goals and strategy.

If you don't agree on where you are today.

The second part is strategy. Once you know where you are, you can design a strategy that will help you reach your destination. Strategy doesn't have to be a fancy 50-slide deck. The strategy should be your means to overcoming your challenges and reaching your goals. And you should be able, ideally to explain it in a few sentences. If for instance, bugs are your product. Improving quality assurance and your delivery process might be your best strategic lever.

After that we moved to a section called objectives. is where we really start entering into the [00:05:00] OKR mode. Once your direction is set, you can start picking three to five objectives. For the quarter or the year. I've done OKRs on a quarterly basis on a yearly basis.

If you're pretty good at setting up OKRs I think you can go with a quarterly. Otherwise, I would encourage you to go and set them up on a yearly basis. Otherwise, the actual process of setting up the OKRs takes time. It creates a noise in a way. So you pick the rhythm or the frequency that you're interested in, and your objectives should be sub elements of your strategy. So, if you struggle with sales, your strategy may be to double down on marketing and sales by hiring more people and increasing the frequency and intensity of your activities. So in that case, your objectives could be: strengthen your marketing team. Build a bigger, higher quality [00:06:00] pipeline and then increase brand awareness. I usually try to stick to three or four objectives, max. Otherwise things get too complicated and Antoine de St-Exupery gets upset. All

Once you have your objective. You move into the key result section. So for each objective, you'll start adding three to four key results. And the key results should be measurable and show how you're making progress on your objectives.

If we take the build a bigger, higher quality pipeline objective that I just mentioned earlier. Our key results could look like increase win rate from X percent to X percent. It could be improve the lead quality to X percent. Or shorten the sales cycle time from 90 to 60 days. you get the point, try to make it as measurable as possible. And uh, the key results will help you measure if you are on track to [00:07:00] reaching your objectives or not.

OKR framework stopped there with key results. will tell you, well, you should cascade the OKRs at the department level, team, individual level. I think it becomes relatively bureaucratic when you get there. And some companies just spend months, working weeks. on setting up the OKRs instead of actually and running the business.

I know I've been there. But, I think it's a missed opportunity to stop there, right? Because this is really where you can make a difference. instead of thinking of cascading, the OKRs I'd like you to think in terms of roadmap and a roadmap is basically a plan for how you will achieve your objectives and key results.

It's basically your list of initiatives that will help you get there. instance, your Win Rate is too low. What are you going to do about it? just wish for it to go up. are probably a couple of ways for you to fix this. If for instance, you could, I don't your team to boost their ability to convert [00:08:00] leads into customers. You could refine your sales, scripts and materials or collaterals.

You could implement a sales enablement tool to help your team sell more effectively.

really the roadmap where you lay out the things that you, the rest of the team will do to move the key results and achieve your objectives.

After that, what we've done is we fought, we in sprints and, you know, with task management let's say so for each initiative in our roadmap, we'll create a project in Notion. sprints and tasks are then attached to all of these relevant projects.

So that's a way to connect the day-to-day with the strategic without becoming too bureaucratic. With Notion, the beauty of this is that everything is in one place. You know, we have created a OKR template for you.

If you're interested. basically everything fits on more or less one page.

So this Strategy and OKR framework [00:09:00] has helped our team get on the same page and achieve more, but it's been a process and I've done that. Uh, different types and sizes of companies. You know, from a $1.5 billion company to 150 employee and smaller startups. It requires work. It requires It accountability.

So if you decide to adopt framework and try it, you need to keep in mind the main principles of growth marketing. So basically what you do, you test it and iterate until you find what really works and what is best suited, let's say for you and your team.

Let's just recap. Our strategy and OKR framework has a couple of section. with as a team, want to make sure that we agree on what we are today? What are our key challenges and what, we have to overcome. Once we are all on the same page, we can move to the next section, which is a strategy. A couple [00:10:00] of sentences that will explain to us and the rest of the team, how we will overcome that challenge. Then we get into the OKRs, we set our objectives, our key results.

We keep it less is more. And once this is set, we move into the, how we will achieve those objectives and how we will measure them. We look, the roadmap, which is our list of initiatives and we conduct all of that through sprints and task management.

using or considering using Notion and think about what's the best way to direct and align your, your team, I encourage you to grab our effective strategy and OKR Notion template. it in the link in the show notes. Thanks.

Thanks again for listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And as usual you can find the show notes at stunandawecom.

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