Hey, happy Monday!
No one wants to feel like the bottleneck, especially of their own company. It is when this realization comes that it means it is time to change the way of working.
They scour the market for an approach, a framework, even software, that enables their teams to gain autonomy and break free from inefficiencies.
And that is how OKRs meet.
For many, the most common management style is what I call “Management by Expectation.”
We practically expect people to perform a task as we have imagined it even though we have never explained to them how to perform it, so we systematically experience an irreparable sense of disappointment. Sound familiar?
This management style embodies a number of unproductive behaviors related to the exercise of control.
At its opposite is instead a more effective way of working. I have christened it Managing by Real-Time Numbers™ and it uses motivation, transparency, autonomy and objectification of results as drives for performance improvement.
OKRs become the lingua franca between departments. Overcoming conventions of seniority, culture, language, and location.
What are the benefits of running the business with real-time numbers?
Companies are not our lives; rather, they are tools to help us improve them.
Numbers remove hypocrisy and ambiguity from conversations and shift the focus from “I” to “we.
After all, everyone’s job in the company is to change the numbers for the common good. And, why not, have fun along the way.
When you have a handful of numbers to look at teams can finally enjoy 3 major benefits:
1 / Improved ability to make decisions
If the decision has no obvious correlation with the number you need to improve, why are you investing time in making that decision? More importantly, how will it be known later that it was the right decision?
2 / Less work, more impact
Having a set of important, and I stress important, numbers limits the scope of activities that can influence them. Unplanned work that cannot be attributed to any strategic impact is a tax that all companies pay without knowing it!
3 / Quality conversations
When you ask “How are you doing?” you rarely get the answer you expected…. It is usually “Fine” which translated means “Leave me alone.”
But if the conversation continues, the truth will always be suspended between the answer the employee thinks and the answer the manager wants to hear.
Intimacy has to be built over time. But it is an investment that cannot be required of everyone, especially at work. It is more useful to figure out how you can support each other for something that interests you both.
Contributing to someone’s progress is the essence of relationship building. Or maybe I’m wrong?
Have you ever seen what a real OKR program looks like from the inside?
I invited Jenny Herald, VP of Product Evangelism at Quantive, to the STRTGY Meeting this evening to show it to the whole community.
Quantive is the most advanced strategy-execution platform available today. It is used by the world’s highest performing organizations such as Adobe, Chargebee and many others…including all teams that decide to adopt OKRs with STRTGY!
We have prepared a live environment to navigate all stages of the most effective implementation programs and will show you:
- How to map the strategy
- Where are the goals
- How to draw numbers
- How to make them flow effortlessly into the platform, updated and corrected
- How to make teams independent and capable of interpreting and influencing their own results
- How to manage the organizational rhythm
I don’t think anyone in Italy, to date, has ever shown you this level of detail on OKRs. And this is the main reason why you will not want to miss it!
I am sincerely excited,
and waiting for you in the room.
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ⤴
-Antonio
