Sorry! OKRs begins with you!

Did you draft your OKRs? Are you still contemplating how and if to get started with OKRs? If you’re stuck contemplating the pros and cons and analyzing how and if to deploy OKRs, I recommend you stop the analysis now. Begin your analysis by drafting YOUR OKRs. This post is for anyone who’s not yet created OKRs for their team or themselves. If you’re such a person, start drafting YOUR OKRs, now!

The Excuses

After making a presentation on OKRs at a conference, I often have the following questions and answer session at the end:

Q: “How can we get started with OKRs?” 

A: Read the rest of this blog for the answer

Q: “What book can I read to learn more about OKRs?”

A: There are no books on OKRs at the time of this post. High Output Management by Grove is worth reading but it’s not about OKRs. Update: Several books hit the market in 2016 addressing OKRs including mine! Click here to see them.

Q: “How do we know if our organization can really benefit by rolling out OKRs?” 

A: Begin by using OKRs to see if you benefit.

All these questions take the form, I’m human and therefore somewhat lazy. I’m posing questions that enable me to delay the inevitable: figuring out what I should actually be doing and doing it.

Questions for You

Here are some questions designed to motivate you to get started deploying OKRs right now:

• Do you know what to do at work?
• How can you best spend an incremental $200k to drive better results at work?
• Name the 3 things you did last quarter that made the most impact.
• Provide an example of a project that you started on, but quickly stopped working on it once you realized it was no longer a priority.
• Do you track and update a metric each week so that you see a bar go up consistently to reflect your progress?

If you can answer 3 or more of these questions, congratulations, you may be realizing some of the benefits of OKRs! 

If you can’t answer 3 or more of these questions, you’re like most of us. It’s time to get started with phase 1: Draft Your OKRs.

Draft Your OKRs Now!

As many of you already know, it’s very difficult to get started with OKRs. I can help you define a decent set of objectives and measurable key results. If you can do it on your own, great. You don’t need me. For the rest of us, taking 45 minutes with an OKRs coach can make all the difference. If you’d like an OKRs coaching session, please add a comment to this post to introduce yourself and explain what you’re looking to accomplish with OKRs. Someone on my team will follow-up to coordinate your coaching session!

You may want to read chapter one of the new OKRs book I co-authored in 2016. Get your free preview chapter here.