OKR is About Best Practices
One of the most refreshing aspects of the OKRs movement is the fact that the framework doesn’t suffer from a stack of restrictive rules. Fortunately for all of us there is no detailed manifesto of specific practices that must be followed to the letter in order for a company to see benefits from the system. On the contrary, most practitioners and pundits view OKRs as an open source methodology with best practices continuing to emerge and being shared throughout the community.
In my book, Objectives and Key Results, I chronicle those best practices, one of which is the virtue of making OKRs transparent throughout the entire company. While spirited discussions and debates abound on many OKR-related topics, there appears to be unanimity in the belief that everyone in an organization, top to bottom, should be able to see their peers’ OKRs.
Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google and OKRs icon says: “Everybody sets OKRs. You can look up anyone’s goals, anyone’s key results and see what they’re doing – which has some really cool benefits.”[i] Others in the space have suggested, “It is critical for your organization to have transparency on what each member did and what they are doing now. Setting OKRs is a process with a clarifying effect. Your organization knows what you and your team members are contributing to.”[ii]
The rationale for transparency is clear: enhanced collaboration, increased understanding of colleagues’ contributions to strategy, and improved goal setting to name just a few. But is there a dark and potentially damaging side effect looming beneath the surface of transparency?
Keeping Up With the Joneses
Psychologists define social comparison theory as the tendency to determine our own social and personal worth based on how we stack up to others. Thus, we are constantly making self and other evaluations across a variety of circumstances, work included. Sometimes, those comparisons can lead to negative outcomes as one recent study discovered. In the experiment researchers examined more than 5,500 students who completed an assignment for a massive open online course, and then evaluated peer papers of differing quality. Approximately 68% of students who assessed average essays went on to finish and pass the course. However, of those students who evaluated high-quality essays; which gave them the opportunity to compare themselves to peers who were performing exceptionally well, only 45% completed the course.[iii]
Applying this research to OKRs, does it mean employees and teams who have produced less than stellar scores will be demoralized and ready to give up when confronted by colleagues crushing every goal out of the park? Fortunately, the answer is no.
Failure is Okay, If We Learn & Grow From the Experience
First of all, additional academic evidence suggests that a certain amount of upward comparison actually stimulates progress and learning. During my OKR Coaching sessions, I tell leaders that their job is to rouse that progress, rather than let teams and individual employees wallow in self-doubt for their perceived lack of achievement. We fuel the passion and energy for growth by creating a culture in which failing to achieve 100% of our OKRs is not only accepted, it’s encouraged. Indeed, if your teams are easily accomplishing every OKR each quarter they’re not preternaturally talented, they’re sandbagging.
When setting OKRs you want everyone to reach beyond what they think is possible and craft goals that, if achieved, will blow away the “business as usual” paradigm many people find themselves trapped in. To encourage that level of risk taking, which can be daunting and downright scary when first encountered, leaders must create an environment in which “negative” results are used not for punishment, but for learning. Of course you’ll want to celebrate the achievement of challenging OKRs, but for those who aimed big but weren’t able to hit their numbers, it’s vital to express the fact that those results have value as well, so long as the they are used to learn more about the business. What happened? What obstacles did we face? What can we learn from these outcomes?
By creating a culture in which people feel safe to stretch you can ensure transparency is working for everyone.
Paul Niven is Global OKR Coach and author of Objectives & Key Results.
[i] See: https://blog.betterworks.com/webinar-recap-part-1-googles-svp-people-operations-weighs-transparency-okrs-work/ [ii] See: https://7geese.com/learn-from-google-on-how-to-set-okrs/ [iii] Art Markman, Don’t Look Now,” Psychology Today, August, 2016