How to Set Quarterly OKRs and Monthly Goals - Tutorial Video
New to OKRs? This 7-minute video gives a simple overview of how to set quarterly OKRs that align with a larger strategic objective.
New to OKRs? This 7-minute video gives a simple overview of how to set quarterly OKRs that align with a larger strategic objective. Ideal for project or program managers, this tutorial will also demonstrate how to create monthly goals that support the quarter’s objectives and key results.
To get the worksheets used in the tutorial video, download my FREE ebook, ‘How to Create Your Strategic Operating Rhythm’.
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Create Your Operating Rhythm
This ebook delves into the common challenges that hinder strategy execution and offers recommendations for how to implement an operating rhythm that will transform your organization into an effective strategy execution powerhouse.
A Beginner's Guide to Defining Strategic OKRs
New to using OKRs? Start here. This brief beginner’s guide to OKRs will quickly get you up to speed on how to set objectives and key results and why.
Organizations and teams are constantly seeking ways to align their teams, set clear objectives, and drive results. One effective method is the use of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). OKRs provide a structured approach to defining and measuring strategic goals, helping organizations of all sizes stay focused and agile.
In this beginner's guide, we will explore how to define your organization's strategic OKRs to drive success.
What are OKRs?
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a goal-setting framework originally popularized by Intel and made famous by companies like Google. OKRs consist of two primary components:
Objectives: These are clear, concise, and ambitious statements that define what you want to achieve. Objectives should be inspiring and provide direction for the organization. They answer the question: "What do we want to accomplish?"
Key Results: Key Results are specific, measurable outcomes that indicate you've reached your objective. They are the quantifiable, time-bound targets that help you track progress. They answer the question: "How will we measure our success?"
Defining Your Strategic OKRs
Start with Your Vision and Mission
Your OKRs should be aligned with your organization's overarching vision and mission. These are the core principles that guide your business. Use them as a foundation for setting objectives that move you closer to fulfilling your mission.
Identify Your Focus Areas
Determine the key areas where you want to make significant progress. Consider factors such as market growth, customer satisfaction, product development, or operational efficiency. Your objectives should reflect your organization's strategic priorities.
Set Clear, Inspirational Objectives
Your objectives should be ambitious and inspiring. They should motivate your team to push their limits. For example, an objective could be "Become the market leader in customer satisfaction."
Create Measurable Key Results
Key Results should be specific, measurable, and time-bound. They provide a clear path for assessing progress. For the objective mentioned above, key results could include: "Achieve a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 80 or higher by the end of the year."
Keep It Simple
While it's tempting to create numerous objectives and key results, it's often more effective to focus on a few critical ones. Keep it simple to maintain clarity and focus. At most, an organization should have three to five strategic objectives with three to five key results each.
Align and Cascade
OKRs should be cascaded throughout the organization. Ensure that team and individual OKRs align with the higher-level objectives. This alignment keeps everyone moving in the same direction.
Regularly Review and Adapt
OKRs are not set in stone. Regularly review progress, and be prepared to adapt your OKRs as circumstances change. Sometimes, you may need to pivot and set new objectives to respond to evolving market conditions.
be Transparent and Accountable
Share your OKRs with the entire organization. Transparency encourages accountability, as everyone can see how their efforts contribute to the organization's goals.
Use OKR Software
Consider using OKR software to track and manage your OKRs effectively. These tools simplify the process, make progress visible, and enable better collaboration.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a powerful tool for defining and measuring strategic goals. They provide organizations with clarity, focus, and a sense of purpose. By starting with your vision and mission, setting clear objectives and measurable key results, and aligning your OKRs throughout the organization, you can drive success and propel your organization toward its mission. Remember that OKRs are a dynamic framework, allowing you to adapt and respond to changing conditions. By implementing OKRs effectively, you can set your organization on a path to continuous growth and improvement.
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Note: This post was written with the assistance of AI
Story As Strategy: Set Your Rhythm
Make planning and measurement more regular occurrences.
Part 3 of the Strategic Story Masterplan is the Journey- aka, Set Your Rhythm.
In a story, the journey is the path that the Main Character takes to go from the start of the story to happily ever after. The journey involves the decisions the Main Character makes and the resulting outcomes. The Main Character learns and grows by completing the journey.
For strategy, rhythm refers to operating rhythm, i.e., the methods, habits, routines and protocols that the Main Character (the project, team, or organization) employs to go from where it is today to where it envisions itself at the completion of the strategy. The rhythm encompasses how objectives & goals are set, how how decisions are made and how progress, learning and growth are measured and communicated.
The Journey - Set Your Rhythm
What
Set annual, quarterly and monthly planning and measurement routines. Stay focused on the end goal while responding and adapting to what’s happening now.
Why
Make planning and measurement more regular occurrences. Respond to changes in priority. Reflect the most current reality of the progress you’ve made.
When
Annual and quarterly strategic planning. Monthly and weekly task planning and measurement.
The Strategic Story Masterplan Framework
The Strategic Story Masterplan is my own story-based framework for defining or refining strategy or a strategic initiative for a team, product or organization.
As a framework, it is meant to serve as a guide. A collection of parts that can be used individually or in any combination that make sense for your situation.
Subscribe to my Youtube Channel to learn how to
Tell Your Story, Set Your Operating Rhythm and Establish Your Systems.
Story As Strategy: Establish Your Systems
If you’re going to grow, you’ll need the right systems.
Part 4 of the Strategic Story Masterplan is Support - aka, Establish Your Systems.
Systems are the tools, applications and platforms that help automate your operating rhythm so that they are more efficient, more accurate and less costly. Systems are what allow for scaling vs. growth.
Systems are also the relationships and networks you belong to that allow you to multiply your results without multiplying your efforts.
Support - Establish Your Systems
What
Select the tools and templates that help you standardize and automate your annual, quarterly and monthly routines and daily operations
Define and prioritize the relationships and activities that will expand your reach or multiply your efforts.
Why
If you’re going to grow, you’ll need ‘just right’ systems that will allow you to do more, better, faster and for less cost.
If you’re going to grow, you’ll need the support of ‘just right’ people to amplify your message and efforts.
When
Annually. Once selected, your systems should be assessed or upgraded at least once a year.
The Strategic Story Masterplan Framework
The Strategic Story Masterplan is my own story-based framework for defining or refining strategy or a strategic initiative for a team, product or organization.
As a framework, it is meant to serve as a guide. A collection of parts that can be used individually or in any combination that make sense for your situation.
Subscribe to my Youtube Channel to learn how to
Tell Your Story, Set Your Operating Rhythm and Establish Your Systems.
Why Traditional Strategic Planning Doesn’t Work
You and your team have just finished setting your strategic plan. A few months into the year… everything changes.
Why Traditional Strategic Planning Doesn’t Work
You and your team have just finished setting your strategic plan. After several days of workshops and breakout sessions, you’ve come up with the goals and initiatives that you want to focus on for the next year or more. You feel good about the direction you’ve chosen to take and the clarity you and your team have after coming up with a strategy together.
A few months into the year… everything changes.
The operating budget you thought you would get was significantly less than expected. You also found out that you’ll need to upgrade all of your laptops and office applications to comply with a new federal policy before the end of the year. You have a surge of new clients that you didn’t anticipate, but you’re also spending a lot on adding new resources to meet the extra demand.
The strategic plans and projects that you just decided on just a few weeks earlier suddenly seem unimportant. There are more pressing issues to deal with. The projects are put on hold or completely abandoned. They may or may not be reconsidered at the next strategic planning session - the following year.
why Story makes an ideal framework for defining (and redefining) strategy
4 Reasons Story Makes Sense for Defining Strategy
It’s engaging, emotionally evocative, and flexible enough to keep up with the changing conditions that often require continual adjustments to strategy.
A story lends itself to being edited and revised while still progressing toward a pre-determined outcome. As external and internal circumstances change, a story-based strategy allows the ‘what’ of the strategy to remain constant and the ‘how’ of the strategy to unfold one chapter at a time.
Organizations and teams who adopt a story-based planning framework create an environment that encourages rapid learning, adaptation and resilience.
Storytelling invites more input and participation from all levels into strategic planning and decision-making.
The Strategic Story Masterplan Framework
The Strategic Story Masterplan is my own story-based framework for defining or refining strategy or a strategic initiative for a team, product or organization.
As a framework, it is meant to serve as a guide. A collection of parts that can be used individually or in any combination that make sense for your situation.
define your main character
map your motivation
set your rhythm
establish your systems
Subscribe to my Youtube Channel to learn how to
Tell Your Story, Set Your Operating Rhythm and Establish Your Systems.
Story As Strategy: Map Your Motivation
Get to know your audience better, so you can better deliver what they need.
Part 2 of the Strategic Story Masterplan is Map Your Motivation.
In a story, the Motivation is what drives the Main Character to action. It is the reason that compels the Main Character to go on a Journey of change and growth.
For a strategy, the Motivation is what drives the Main Character of the strategy (i.e., the team, the project or program, the organization) to pursue its goals, objectives and plans. It is what inspires the Main Character to accomplish its happily ever after, or strategic vision.
Map Your Motivation
What
Identify your 3 motivations by getting to know your audience, your purpose and your role models.
Why
Get to know your audience better, so you can better deliver what they need. Get more clarity about your purpose, so your your strategic decisions and projects are more aligned. Identify your role models, so you’ll know the standards and best practices you should adopt.
When
Quarterly. Create once. Then review and refine at least 3 times a year.
Subscribe to my Youtube Channel to learn how to
Tell Your Story, Set Your Operating Rhythm and Establish Your Systems.
Story As Strategy: Define Your Main Character
Before you can figure out where you’re going, you have to understand who you are and where you’ve come from.
Part 1 of the Strategic Story Masterplan is Define Your Main Character.
The Main Character of your strategic story is the individual or group that will define, prioritize and accomplish the objectives and outcomes to achieve your happily ever after, or, strategic vision.
Understanding your Main Character’s backstory and identity is an essential first step to defining a strategy that aligns with your values, strengths and capabilities.
Define Your Main Character
What
Assess yourself, your team, organization or product to define what makes you unique and why you do what you do.
Why
Before you can figure out where you’re going, you have to understand who you are and where you’ve come from. When you know your strengths and have a clear sense of your identity and values, you’re in a better position to define a future vision that is aligned with them & communicate it clearly to your team, customers and stakeholders.
When
Annually. Create once. Then review and refine at least once a year.
The Strategic Story Masterplan Framework
The Strategic Story Masterplan is my own story-based framework for defining or refining strategy or a strategic initiative for a team, product or organization.
As a framework, it is meant to serve as a guide. A collection of parts that can be used individually or in any combination that is relevant for your planning scenario.
Subscribe to my Youtube Channel to learn how to
Tell Your Story, Set Your Operating Rhythm and Establish Your Systems.
Your Story is Your Strategy
For a writer, a story is a constant work-in-progress. As a leader, your organization and its strategic initiatives are continual works-in-progress. There are any number of decisions that can be made for any number of reasons, each of which will lead to a different branch in your strategic story and a different variation of the story’s ending.
Most stories are essentially the same.
They follow a similar pattern that makes it easier for us to relate to them.
A main character has a destiny, a happily ever after they must get to. In getting to that happily ever after, they make plans that often go awry and lead them into adventure and occasional setbacks.
They meet all sorts of interesting characters along the way, some who even join them for the rest of the journey. FInally, the main character arrives at the story’s end. Not exactly in the happily ever after they’d hoped for, but having learned and grown along the way and in a much better place than they were at the start of the story.
Doesn’t that sound a lot like how your last strategic program or major initiative turned out? Does it not describe the constant daily adventures and setbacks of trying to achieve your organization’s mission and goals?
For a writer, a story is a constant work-in-progress. As a leader, your organization and its strategic initiatives are continual works-in-progress. There are any number of decisions that can be made for any number of reasons, each of which will lead to a different branch in your strategic story and a different variation of the story’s ending.
How do you make these decisions quickly and in a way that shows the ever-evolving narrative of your strategy, but still leads to a satisfying (if not expected) ending?
Why Story Makes Sense for communicating Strategy
Unlike traditional communication, story-based communication lends itself to communicating strategy. Traditional communication tends to center more on the sender of the message and what they want to communicate. There is little to no room for interpretation.
This makes it more suitable for directives and instructions.
Storytelling is more audience-centered. It focuses on what the receiver will get out of the story and allows the receiver to participate in interpreting the story’s meaning to them.
As strategy is constantly evolving, there is a need for a communication style or approach that is similarly evolutionary. Like a story, a strategy is meant to inspire those who receive it to own it for themselves, to participate in bringing the strategy to life.
Terrence Gargiulo, former Chief Storyteller at Accenture, highlights the differences between traditional and story-based communication. His findings are illustrated in the following table.
“Like a story, a strategy is meant to inspire those who receive it to own it for themselves, to participate in bringing the strategy to life. ”
Ways to Bring A Story-Based Approach to Communicating Your Strategy Internally
Share behind-the-scenes of strategic planning sessions
Create low- or no-text visualizations of strategy / key initiatives
Publish strategy updates & team stories on internal social platforms
Invite strategy feedback / comments
Hold town halls to share stories / questions about strategy & strategic initiatives
Encourage team storytelling rituals on strategic initiatives
A Masterplan Is Better Than Goals
Goals are pretty good as a to-do list of of things you want to accomplish or achieve. But when you're in a leadership position and you have all of these moving parts to orchestrate, goals alone aren't enough.
Video Transcript:
When you start to reach a certain level of self-development or evolution or even when you're in a position of leadership, whether that just be self-leadership or leadership of others, I think you start to recognize that goals are not enough to drive how you're going to move from the current level to the next level.
Goals are pretty good as a to-do list of of things you wanna accomplish or achieve. But when you're in a leadership position and you have all of these moving parts to orchestrate, goals alone aren't enough to encapsulate all that needs to be considered as the person who is sitting in the middle of all these moving parts and having to be the orchestrator of all those moving parts, or having to be the one who maintains the constant vision.
For that, you need a masterplan. And the master plan it's a term that I borrowed from civic design in that a master plan is basically a strategy for a physical place. For a physical location. So it's a community or a neighborhood or a block and the civic designer develops a master plan for that physical geography to say that this is how it exists now, but over a period of time, this is how it's going to evolve, and this is what the future vision of this physical or geographic location is gonna be.
If they just were like, here are the goals for this plot of land, or Here's the goal for this community, that's a little too simple because when you're transforming physical geographic space and it's a huge amount of space with a lot of moving parts, there's infrastructure, there's neighborhoods, there's homes, there's commercial areas. A lot of things have to work in concert to make this vision a reality within this physical space. And that takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of negotiation, takes a lot of conversation, it takes a lot of campaigning, it takes a lot of re-explaining the vision over and over again. Sometimes you may have a priority for the current year that maybe the budget isn't there, or you ran into an infrastructure roadblock and you've gotta deprioritize and come up with something else that still pushes towards that full master plan vision.
And so when we find ourselves in leadership positions, and that position of a leader is really that same idea of having to transform something that is comprised of a lot of moving parts. Transform that over time from where it is now to what it will be when it's this future vision, then you have to have a master plan, even if that thing that you're evolving over time is you as the leader.
So this is why I promote not only having goals, but also having a master plan that stretches over a period of time, and that is flexible enough to evolve and adapt as the situations change. As you encounter roadblocks, as budget or resources are not available or are available, you can have this overarching master plan that you can refer to over and over again to recenter yourself on the long-term future vision while still having all of the pieces you need to do on a day-to-day, month-to-month, year to year basis, to keep progressing along a timeline that will lead you to that vision.
Do you manage your team or business using goals or do you have a masterplan?
IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE YOUR FUTURE
CHANGE YOUR STORY.
Write your next chapter with a story-based strategic framework that evolves as you do.
