Getting good goal updates from your team

Good goal updates provide you with the tools you need to make strategic decisions about your OKRs. When teams are giving you a mix of trailing and leading indicators and clearly communicating what they need to be successful, you can make the right choices about where to spend your time.

Leading vs. trailing indicators

The information your team can give you about your goal will either tell you what has already happened (trailing indicators of success) or what will happen in the future (leading indicators of success).

Leading indicators

Leading indicators are what will cause success or failure for this goals. Leading indicators include:

• Sentiment or confidence in hitting the goal (this is usually a synthesis of many factors)

• Projects that are being worked on or are recently completed

• Information that isn't yet public (A customer mentioned they plan on churning, for example)

• Other work that is taking focus away from a goal.

Trailing indicators

Trailing indicators will only tell you part of the story. These include:

• Current metrics for a key result

• Other, related metrics (When tracking revenue, looking at the number of deals in a given stage, for example)

What should be included in an update?

Good goal updates will include both leading and trailing indicators-- where are we at currently and what is the most likely outcome moving forward? They'll also include additional plans for how to approach the key result based on those factors. In all, your teams' goal updates should include:

• Current metric

• Confidence on achieving the metric (red/yellow/green)

• An analysis of the key result

  • What has been done already for this key result?

  • What needs to be done differently or what additional efforts need to be made?

  • What help or other resources are needed

• What tasks or projects are planned for this key result?

Creating a culture of transparency

Transparent teams write the best goal updates, but creating a transparent team isn't as simple as saying you have one. Transparent teams ACT:

• Accountability

• Celebration

• Think of what's next

Accountability

Accountability starts with managers (and executives) that engage with your OKR process. That means managers are accountable to make sure their teams are writing their goal updates, reading each other's goal updates, and talking about the goal updates.

The easiest way to ensure this happens is to carve out time each week in a weekly meeting to discuss the goals. This will give you dedicated time to look at all of the updates from the team to ensure they're done and discuss them openly to help plan how to get or keep them on track.

Celebration

OKRs are, at a minimum, 12 weeks of work on goals that may or may not be hit. This means that giving your team some time to celebrate progress can help keep your team moving forward. But that doesn't just mean celebrating success- we don't want to save celebration for hitting the KRs or being over a certain percentage; we want to celebrate times where your team is living up to your values, especially the value of transparency.

This can mean celebrating things like:

• A team member not missing any check-ins on their key results

• Someone marking a goal as red and articulating what is needed to be successful

• Someone commenting on their teammates check-in to ask a question or celebrate work that's been done

• Someone not having any overdue tasks

The key is ensuring that your team feels comfortable participating in the OKR process, including feeling comfortable sharing bad news.

Think of what's next

The goal updates aren't the end of the OKR process. We want to make sure that we are actively helping our teams. If a team is saying that they don't feel they can hit a goal and need assistance, we need to give them assistance or help them prioritize. Otherwise, team members will quickly realize that it doesn't really matter what they put in their updates since it makes no impact on the resources they have to work on their goals.

That doesn't mean every team member is going to get exactly what they want. And there will be times that your team members will need things that you don't think are right or will want to approach things in a way you disagree with. The important part of the process, however, is to disagree and commit. Especially when we've given ownership of a key result to a team member, we want to give them a chance to have that ownership and get results. We can step in when needed, but otherwise let them own their key result. Likewise, team members need to understand that, especially with committed goals, they may need to take directions they disagree with. That's OK-- we don't expect everyone to 100% agree on everything, but we should expect that once the discussion is done, that everyone plays their part on the chosen path.

This doesn't work without documentation

Any conversations should be documented. Transparency is only transparency when those discussions are available for anyone who may have missed them. Notes can be taken in comments on key results so that you can refer back to them in the future, and team members know that their updates are not just a way to add metrics, but a living document that helps set the direction for the team.