Transform Your OKR Culture

 

For OKRs to be successful you need to cultivate the right company culture

OKR implementation team

Company culture is the biggest killer of OKRs! We’ve seen it time and time again when clients approach us because they’re not seeing the impact from OKRs that they hoped for.

We don’t just help you put the right skills, routines and practices in place, but also help you create a successful OKR culture.

How we help you to cultivate the company culture and conditions required for OKRs to be successful

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Personal Leadership Coaching

 

We spend time supporting and coaching leaders to understand what is required for an OKR initiative to become sticky.

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Data Led Tailoring

 

We lead with the data which shows us what needs to be worked on at the beginning of the initiative, to give you the very best foundations.

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Aligned Understanding

 

Before we can craft great OKRs, we need to create an aligned understanding of the basic behaviours leaders need to model around OKRs.

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Psychological Safety

 

Helping your leaders to foster the safe spaces needed, for transparency and accountability; amongst the senior leaders and the wider organisation.

Crafting great OKRs alone isn’t enough to drive innovation within your business. To implement successful OKRs, your team needs to be able to communicate openly and honestly about their confidence of achieving key results.

Blame culture can stifle confidence within your team, which can ultimately lead to the failure of your OKRs. To succeed, you must cultivate a trusting and supportive and OKR culture. A positive company culture where your OKRs can thrive. 

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Ready to transform your company culture?

Book a call with our team.

 

What is OKR culture?

OKRs are best thought of as a set of principles which can be applied in a way that best suits the company. How these principles play out depends hugely on company culture. If there is a high degree of criticism and blame then it’s unlikely that people will feel “safe” enough to be honest about their confidence levels when discussing their OKRs. When used in the right way, OKRs can bring teams together by making it clear what everyone’s contribution needs to be towards a higher level goal and how vital their input is. 

 

Psychological safety is vital when it comes to using OKR to drive innovation. If the organisation has a cultural belief that all failure is bad, then any attempt to encourage new thinking and experimentation will likely fail as people will fear the consequences of failure.  

Is my organisation ready for OKRs?

First you need to look at the motivations for wanting to use OKRs. Some organisations want to use them to strengthen alignment as they can see that their pace of growth needs it; others want to use them to replace more traditional forms of people performance management.

 

The first is more about motivation, teamwork and cross-functional working.

 

The second is more focused on reinforcing existing control structures.

 

The latter (people performance management) is not a good use of OKRs at all.

 

We firmly believe that OKRs work best when used for managing growth, change, and innovation and look for the organisation’s appetite for this. If it’s high, OKRs are likely to be a good fit for the business. 

How do I change my company culture? 

Change management!  That’s what usually trips up OKRs in the early stages.

 

A lot of organisations who adopt OKRs are relatively young, and many organisations that implement OKRs aren’t experienced in “managing change.”

 

We use our own model to help with the change management process. Here are some tips when it comes to changing your company culture.

 

  • Measure it.  Believe it or not, it’s possible to build up data on your culture by measuring the values which are present within it.  As the saying goes, you manage what you measure.

 

  • Create (or validate) a set of three values.  Three is the magic number for recall and that’s really important. If you want them to have an impact, they need to be remembered.

 

  • Once you have your three values, facilitate teams in translating them into what they look like if they’re working really well in their area.