9 COMMON MISTAKES WHEN APPLYING OKR | GOALIFY
What are the common patterns that keep organization failed when applying OKR into your operation? Here is the list that I hope you do not step in that failing wheel trail.
1. You are setting too many OKR for a week or a month.
The top reason is your business misunderstand and see the objective and key result like a daily operation task list. People set too many objectives, and that becomes a mess as well as a distraction and keeps us away from focusing on the core goal.
This mistake makes your team go opposite with the philosophy of OKR which is to keep your team concentrating on the objective that matters most. OKR is about helping you and team present and define your critical, top priorities.
Focusing on less than 5. OKR is not a to-do list of your organization.
2. You set OKR just for a week or a month.
That is not the best practice of setting a goal. If you are just tracking your goal within a month or a week, that not a kind of goal, it is just a task. A goal should be a set of measurable key results to push your company, or team reach the bold impact.
3. Top-down approach.
You are setting the top-down method, and looking for something like MOB, OKR is not for you. OKR is about two-way communicate and feedback top-down and bottom-up. Your business goal needs to encouraging your team to become more motivated to get out of the bed every morning and to achieve the ambitious goal. Let’s say like, shooting the moon!
You need to avoid the top-down approach because it lacks feedbacks from reality and agreement from the executor. This way is very subjective. You can’t set the goal for the other, you just only can make them align their goals to the primary organization target.
4. Your Key Result are task, not Key Result
A Key Results is not something that you need to do; it’s the success outcome of what you did.
For example:
Task: Set the client meeting.
KR: Set 10 client meeting to collect feedback on Jul 15.
5. Fail in weekly tracking check-in.
Most of the time, people fail because of not constantly updating status and report. Hence, manager and leader will find it difficult to evaluate the situation as well as to make the decision to react to the current process.
Check-in is the top priority MUST-DO of OKR. You cannot fail in this. You can’t do anything and react with the process if your team is failing to update the key result.
6. You make OKR become a part of the performance review.
Every big guy like Google, Zynga or Swipely warns against this. You can’t punish people for their failure and at the same time, encourage them to reach their ambitious goal. The weekly update helps employees to weekly review what they have accomplished. When you are aiming for the start, you can hit the moon.
Moreover, OKR’s principal purpose is about pushing your team to improve the operation efficient, boost more productivity, that is a different concept with MOB or KPI which are about measuring the employee performance to consider the compensation.
7. No-owner
You are setting an objective without an owner. It means you don’t have anyone to be responsible for handling that goal.
8. Team Objectives are not synchronized
Top challenging of every business is to keep everyone aligning with one another. The team has to communicate with each other when setting OKRs, otherwise achieving alignment will be impossible.
9. Set it and just watch it
Don’t treat your OKR like a new year’s resolution. OKR need to be a part of the culture, need to be followed & updated on a regular basis.
