Commit to Your OKRs as a Team

Commit to Your OKRs as a Team

At this point, maybe you’re wondering: Why are we doing so much work to describe our goals?

It’s because OKRs help teams to work together.

In addition to adding clarity about what a team wants to accomplish (the Objective), and metrics to prove you’ve accomplished them (the Key Results), there’s an important piece to making OKRs work for your organization: commitment.

Whenever we set an OKR, it’s a commitment to our team that “we’re going to get this done.”

We’re going to get this done even while we navigate our other responsibilities.

We’re going to get this done even when a shiny new priority or unexpected challenge pops up.

And if someone on our team falls behind, we commit to helping each other succeed.

That may mean that other things that seem important become lower priorities – at least for the cycle ahead. But we agree that right now, this set of priorities is the best choice for our collective success.

It’s about going from my goals to our commitments.

Negotiating tradeoffs between teams

Imagine there’s a company where sales and engineering write their own sets of OKRs independently. The sales team prioritizes growth with features most requested by customers. The engineering team prioritizes building a new product for a new market.

Each team may have written perfect OKRs for their respective roles.

Why should sales slow down and risk missing their revenue targets? And how should engineering reconcile short-term growth with long-term development?

Which is more important? Each option carries tradeoffs.

And so the question becomes: What is your organization’s process for making tradeoffs? How can we succeed if we’re moving in different directions?

That’s where committing to a shared set of OKRs comes in. It’s a step that triggers tough but necessary discussions.

Posting and discussing a clear set of OKRs and getting commitment to them is one of the best ways to negotiate tradeoffs. You want to do it at the start of the cycle, before teams get too far down the road on their own.

Commiting to Growth as a Team

Commitment means more than aligning your Objectives. It’s about taking a broader perspective.

“What’s good for us is also good for me, and what’s good for me is also good for us.”

So if the organization commits to growth in the existing market as the top priority, engineering agrees to allocate their resources to support the sales team – even if they’d rather prioritize new product development.

Next quarter, perhaps, sales will agree that new products should be the priority. And they’ll set goals that require less engineering support.

As John likes to say, collective commitment is one of the five Superpowers of OKRs that drive operating excellence.