What’s crucial in goal settings?

What’s crucial in goal settings?

Setting goals is critical to the success of any venture, personal or business. It gives us motivation, allows us to measure progress and overcome procrastination. Yet, many of us fail to set goals.

What’s crucial in goal settings?

Let us explore OKR.

Objectives and key results(OKR) is a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes.

Grove’s simple but effective concept is explained by John Doerr: “The key result has to be measurable. But in the end, you can look, and without any arguments: Did I do that or did I not do it? Yes? No? Simple. No judgments in it.

According to Andy Grove, it doesn’t really matter what you know, the secret is in the execution, it’s all about results.

The key is to set meaningful and audacious goals.

OKRs comprise an objective—a clearly defined goal—and one or more key results

The goal of OKR is to define how to achieve objectives through concrete, specific and measurable action.

Objectives should also be supported by initiatives, which are the plans and activities that help to achieve the objective and move forward the key results.

To set meaningful Goals start with WHY, what is your compelling why?

Larry Page, the CEO of Alphabet and co-founder of Google, credited OKRs within the foreword to Doerr’s book: “OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of ‘organizing the world’s information’ perhaps even achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most.

A compelling sense of WHY should be a launchpad for our objectives, which should be significant, action-oriented, inspiring. It should help as a vaccine against fuzzy thinking.

Truly transformational teams combine their ambition to their passion into their purpose, as a result, they develop a compelling sense of why.

The how of goal setting are the key results:

Good results are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic, measurable and verifiable. 

How to set a good OKR

When setting OKR, It’s important not to get the objective and key results mixed up.

Objectives are your big ambitious goals 

Key results measure the achievement of an objective.

Weekly plan are daily task and initiative for you to achieve your goals.

Before writing OKR’s you need a good understanding on what you want to accomplish.

Setting good Objective will help to accomplish your goals 

Ask your self the following questions

• Does it help to achieve personal/company goals?
• Is it inspiring?
• Does it move you/company forward?
• Is it time bound?
• Are the expected results Annual or quarterly 

What objective are not

• Objectives are not to be easy
• Objective are not projects or subtasks, they are aspirational goals 
• Key results are not task or plans

Example of a good objective:

To create an objective for a company to increase revenue.

The objective could be written as below:

To achieve record 3rd quarter revenue growth. 

It works because it is aspirational time bound and it moves the company forward.

After choosing objective decide key result.

Key results must be:

• specific
• Quantifiable
• Achievable 
• Lead to objective grading
• Be difficult but not impossible 

Key results are not:

• binary
• Not task to be achieved

Example of key results for previous objective :

Objective – Achieve record 3D quarter revenue growth.

KR1 – generate 100k in new revenue 

KR2- reduce customer churn in the first quarter from 15% to 10%

KR3 Onboard 300 new clients 

The above key results are quantifiable, objectively graded and challenging.

Other examples of OKR

Make our company go viral

KR1 – Generate 10,000 views on our YouTube channel

KR2 – Get 10,000 followers on Instagram

KR3 – Increase organic search traffic to our website by 20%

The OKR is not a silver bullet, however, when the fundamentals are in place they take you to the top of the mountain.