OKRs as a journey

“We need to implement OKRs across the organization. We have about three weeks at most. Let’s train the teams and get them working on their OKRs. Talk to Julio from the transformation team and ask him to have his coaches help bring OKRs down to the individual level. If it can be two weeks, that’s better. The competition is already doing it and must bring something good, otherwise they won’t use it. We can’t be left behind.”

Carlos, CEO of a banking company

22,000 employees.

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If I received a dollar for every time I heard a similar argument in adoption processes, it would surely be enough to go to space with my friend Jeff. Carlos' speech at his last board meeting put several people in trouble. Roberto from Finance, Julio from Transformation, Maria from Procurement, Rocio from HR and Victor from IT had to do magic to try to have OKRs in three weeks.

Two weeks ago, the last wave of implementation at the bank ended, twenty-six months later. Yes, three weeks were a bit short. Along the way, they embarked on a transformation journey that they had not planned, but which completely revolutionized the way they viewed their transformation processes. OKRs ended up becoming the foundation, the cornerstone of their organizational evolution.

Over the years, working with CEOs and directors on the corporate adoption of OKRs, I have come across many stories similar to Julio's. OKRs do not only involve defining objectives and key results, they are the path to a process of absolute redefinition of the organization. A path with no turning back. A path that brings the business to the team's conversation table.

We've all had a Carlos-type boss. He under-dimensions the work, in impossible time frames, adding workload without investigating the available capacity, without available plans or budgets, without investigating previous processes, needs or shock strategies. We've come across leaders who assume that a virtual course of minutes, a few templates and an order from Olympus are enough for OKRs to appear by magic and for them to also work.

Unfortunately, we have normalized the idea that to implement OKRs in our organization, we only need to want them. No, OKRs are not for everyone, nor are they harvested from infertile soil. There are prerequisites to take into account, such as the level of transparency, trust, resilience, and courage. It is not something that is worked on overnight, and the time it takes you to build this in your organization will be the time it takes you to launch your OKRs.

Let's go back to Carlos. No matter how agile we want to be, we need a plan. I'm not talking about the traditional, detailed, dense plan with hundreds of pages. We need a plan that contains a strategy that will lead you to achieve your objective. Yes, consider the OKRs of your implementation process. It will help you to dimension the nature of what you are going to work on.

Your strategy must be clear and precise. Avoid “Big Bang” adoptions – sorry, they are disastrous. I have found it useful to implement it in waves and these must be carefully thought out. We don’t even need the whole organization to do OKRs at first. Lay out your strategy and eat the elephant in parts.

Check your budget. Adopting OKRs in an organization is not cheap. I'm not going to lie to you. We spent many hours discovering OKRs and working them under your operating model. The end-to-end of your OKR model is expensive, but let's be honest, it's worth every dollar invested. In one of my most successful coaching processes, we managed to achieve a ROI of 21.7% after one year.

Working with OKRs requires dedication and the capacity of your team. Capacity that you generally don't have. If you want to transform, you're going to have to neglect the business, even if just a little, and this can impact your customers. Are you still interested? Yes, I repeat, OKRs are not for everyone.

You can hire more people, pay overtime, yes, there are ways out, but you will inevitably have to rely on people who know your business and who, luckily for you, are accompanying your client. Transforming or growing your business will require time, involvement and budget. You choose how much you want to risk. When Julio understood this, he knew it would take more than three weeks.

The learning curve of OKR work can be easily represented with the Tuckman model. There will be a formative stage, which will precede a long turbulence. This can roughly represent your first nine months, then your model will normalize so that in no less than a year, you can enjoy a glorious stage of high performance. It is possible and worth it.

My final piece of advice is to get more involved in the in-depth knowledge of OKRs. It will be the most widely used management model in the coming months. Latin America is becoming OKR-colored and many companies increasingly need more professionals who are experts in them. At Lean OKR we have set ourselves the goal of collaborating with our students to build competent profiles in working with OKRs.

We are not interested in you taking away a certificate, there are companies that do that very well. Here we want to accompany you in the most holistic knowledge of this work protocol and for you to enjoy the trip, because this path is not only instructive and full of learning, but the best thing is that the landscape it shows you is incredible.

Welcome to the new era of management. Fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the ride.