Considering individual OKRs? You have a coaching gap, not a goals gap.
TL;DR - Adopting individual OKRs is a mistake that threatens alignment, is time consuming and distracts from the real job of the manager.
Line managing is one of the most important and challenging roles we have in our career. The people in our team place their trust in our ability to guide, support and reward them.
Great managers hold regular 1:1s with their team members, helping them grow.
In many of the organisations I’ve worked with appraisal time is stressful, leads to complaints of unfairness and is seen by some as a waste of time.
Appraisal time is a challenge for managers.
At best you’re wrestling with a dire HR workflow you see once a year. At worst you have to spend a lot of time understanding your team members’ contributions and performance for the past 12 months.
The best line managers want to be fair and the worst want to devote the minimum amount of time to the responsibility. Both conditions lead to a search for an objective measure of individual attainment and progress.
Life is much simpler when we can attach a number to something. If that number has a function behind it, all the better. If we can give our team members a measurable goal, we can derive a calculation to use in their appraisal.
As organisations adopt OKR (and other frameworks) to define and measure success, it seems natural to extend these goals to the individual level. If we can ask “How close did you get to hitting that number?” we have an illusion of a fair system.
The easier option?
Scoring someone against a key result is a lot easier than putting the effort in to understand our team members and to help them grow.
This has two main problems, you really want to avoid:
- Creating individual OKRs is time consuming and adds an extra layer to your process of setting OKRs. Good teams will occasionally change their goals, will you put the time in to update all of the individual OKRs?
- You create a new focus for each individual. Instead of focusing on collaborative success, they now have their own thing to achieve. Collaboration is tricky enough, without this distraction.
The bottom line, individual OKRs are solving a symptom, not the problem. Appraisals are difficult because we don’t know our team members well enough. We spend too little time helping them grow and have too many other distractions.
The coach, not the appraiser
If we work closely with them as a coach and manage their performance with them throughout the year, appraisal time is much simpler. We easily recall the success and failures, but more importantly we can remember the growth, the learning and the development.
I’ve long been an advocate of the weekly 1:1, even when I had far too many direct reports, but I see the need more clearly than ever now. Feedback, support and coaching are the primary role of the manager and yet it is often diluted to mere administration.
Weekly discussion is the bare minimum and yet I have worked with countless companies where individuals rarely speak with their line manager.
As Marty Cagan says in Empowered, “there should never be any performance‐related surprises in the annual review.” [1]
This is because you’ve worked year round to help people develop and grow. You’ve given them difficult feedback where necessary and encouraged their growth. Starting from this perspective, system challenges aside, appraisals are much easier. I’ve done them both ways, trust me!
Team OKRs and individual contribution
The team OKRs the individual contributes to are part of the appraisal ‘discussion’, but they should also be a feature of the regular 1:1s.
When looking at them with the individual, these are elements of the discussion:
- How did the team do?
- What did the individual contribute?
- How did they collaborate?
- How did they perform their individual tasks?
- What did they learn and what would they do differently?
These are critical questions that help you connect individual appraisal with OKRs. What you absolutely shouldn’t do is base the appraisal primarily on OKR attainment. That can lead to sandbagging - teams setting goals that are too easily reached or favouring single team agency over collaboration.
A final word from Netflix
Netflix don’t have bonuses because they want people to be free to do what’s best for the organisation at any one time. They don’t want them fixating on something just because that’s the goal for the bonus. It’s also why individual OKRs are a bad idea.
If you’re thinking about adopting individual OKRs, think why. You probably have a coaching problem, not a goals problem.
This article was inspired by related thoughts from Peter Kappus.
[1] Cagan, Marty. EMPOWERED (Silicon Valley Product Group) (p. 175). Wiley. Kindle Edition.