Coffee with OKRs #46 · 7 min read
Annual and quarterly goals need different crews, and not for convenience
A large client insisted on writing the annual goals straight away with the whole circle of leaders and product owners, more than 20 people at one table. Midway through the workshop it turned out that there was no shared knowledge or common direction even within the board itself. The session turned into levelling knowledge and ran much longer.
From the episode · in Polish
Who sits down to annual goals, who to quarterly ones, and what to do with everyone else
The episode takes you through two processes at once: choosing people for annual and for quarterly goals, with a stakeholder matrix as the tool, and then preparing the session itself, from materials sent out in advance to a goal template with an example. The part about the negotiation with the working group, meaning why only drafts come out of a workshop, starts at around the forty-second minute. from 00:42:21
The recording is being edited. Leave your address and you'll get the link when it's ready.An annual goal sits close to strategy. A strategy usually has a horizon of 2 to 5 years, so a year is an intermediate period in which we test the best hypotheses about how to get there. Formulating such hypotheses takes the people responsible for the company's direction, usually a small group. A quarterly goal sits close to operations, and that changes the guest list: without the leaders who know the teams' current work, you get goals detached from reality, and on top of that nobody apart from the author feels responsible for them. That is the whole difference, and it doesn't come from someone not wanting to invite people.
The reflex to invite everyone comes from mixing up three different roles. Someone is responsible for making sure the goals get written, and they sit at the table. Someone needs to be consulted, because they have knowledge the authors lack, and this is where we most often go wrong: needing someone's knowledge is not a reason to seat them at the workshop, because that information can be gathered beforehand. Someone needs to be informed, and that happens after the fact. Scale matters here in a measurable way. A group of 4 to 5 people works efficiently, above 10 people a workshop needs solid preparation and separate time to level knowledge, and in a company of 100 to 200 people the question practically doesn't arise, because the board and management operate at such different levels that the board naturally writes the annual goals itself and the leaders come in at the last stage.
There is also a line we don't move in the other direction. The board doesn't come to the leaders with a blank sheet and the question of where the company should go next year. Having an idea of the direction is its own responsibility, even if it doesn't show that idea straight away. It is easy to hear a contradiction here with what we ourselves keep saying about engagement, and for most of the episode that contradiction hangs in the air. It disappears only with one word: what comes out of the workshop is drafts, not goals. A goal becomes whatever has gone through negotiation with the working group that is to deliver it, because only there does it become clear whether the numbers are realistic and what the author couldn't see from above. A goal handed down without that conversation has two outcomes, and both are losing ones: either people don't want to get into a conflict, agree, and after 3 months it turns out they haven't done it, or they refuse outright. In the first case you lose a quarter and both sides are frustrated.
Takeaways
Four things that decide who is in the session
- 01
Two guest lists, not one
Annual goals are written by those responsible for the company's direction. Quarterly goals are written by those who know the teams' current work. Using the same list in both cases gives you either goals detached from operations or a workshop where half the room has nothing to contribute.
- 02
Someone's knowledge is not a reason to invite them
From the people whose knowledge you need for a decision, you gather the data before the session. The workshop stays with those responsible for the result, and the group shrinks on its own, without excluding anyone.
- 03
The board should have its own idea for the year
Coming to the leaders with a blank sheet looks like an invitation to co-create, but it is shifting a responsibility that belongs to the board. The idea doesn't have to be shown straight away, but it has to exist, because otherwise the discussion has no point of reference.
- 04
Drafts are what come out of a workshop
A goal takes shape in negotiation with the working group: whether it is clear, whether the numbers are realistic, what has to be dropped from current work to make room for it. The team is chosen to fit the goal, not the goal to fit the existing team, so the skills often come from more than one department.
The whole topic in one place
How to write OKRs?
About who should sit at the table, we have said everything here. What that crew should then write is a separate matter: the full road from strategy to a quarterly goal with metrics whose numbers you know where to get is in the text on writing goals. From there, links also lead to the other episodes on this topic.
Author
Lena Zhukova
founder; strategy workshops, quarterly sessions
Founder of OKR Poland. For twenty years she has worked with boards of companies from 30 to a few thousand people; she wrote dozens of strategies with them and helped implement them in more than 40 organisations.
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