OKRs connect strategy to execution, yet execution often overshadows strategy in planning. To maintain strategic OKRs, let’s resist the urge to prioritize execution. Here are key points to help you achieve this.
When I was 25 years old, I reached a point in my career where I realized I needed some help.
I was an appreciated system architect in a company I loved, and when the team was split due to a reorganization, the CTO invited me to his office to talk about what I wanted to do next. He wanted to hear where I see myself and help me find a role that I loved within the company.
He came with good intentions and asked good questions, but I couldn’t give him the answers he sought. The only thing I could hear in my head was “I want to be a theater actress”.
It wasn’t a new thing. I knew that since I was 12. But I also loved math and computer science, so life took me into tech. But that little voice didn’t stop. And as I was already 25 years old, I felt the clock ticking. You can’t start an acting career at 40. Back then there was even an age limit to acting school admittance.
But I also loved tech. I realized it was time to choose because I couldn’t stay in tech for the rest of my life and be miserable, but I also didn’t dare to leave everything behind and start fresh as an actress.
That’s when I was first introduced to the world of coaching. I went to a 3-day self-development seminar which was eye-opening.
They said that we live and navigate our lives according to reality as we see it, but what we see isn’t always true. They were not talking about the physical world (although there, too, there are interpretations. For example we all see colors differently). They talked about our deepest thoughts and beliefs, that guide our everyday life more than we know.
The interpretations that we give to a variety of situations and relationships will dictate our reactions, thoughts, feelings, and actions, but these interpretations aren’t the objective truth.
The same situations could be interpreted differently, and with a perfectly valid interpretation that is different than the one we came up with. Different interpretations lead to different feelings, thoughts, and eventually actions and outcomes.
So how can you change your interpretation to one that leads to a positive outcome? It starts with understanding your current interpretation and then replacing it with another.
When these interpretations are not just momentary but are rooted in your past experiences over the years, they become beliefs. We believe something is true, even if we don’t say it explicitly to ourselves, let alone out loud.
When these beliefs do not allow you to see other possibilities, they become limiting beliefs. Things you believe are true, and you act accordingly, but they are not necessarily so. And if you just eliminate them, a new world of possibilities opens up.
In my case, I found many such limiting beliefs in my life — in the seminar itself and during the many years since I took it.
When it came to my acting career, I realized that I had a limiting belief that I wasn’t even aware of — that my parents prevented me from pursuing the career of my dreams. In reality, of course, they couldn’t prevent me from doing that, they were just against it. Had I decided to do so, they would still love and support me.
That realization — that I could pursue this career if I only wanted to — was at the mental and emotional level, not at the practical one. It sounds trivial — of course I could do it if I wanted to, no one was physically preventing me from going there, but I didn’t feel like I could. It was only when I looked at it from a limiting belief perspective I realized that it’s there and guiding everything I do.
The effect of it, by the way, was the opposite of what one could think. As soon as I realized the choice was fully mine, I also realized that I didn’t want to leave tech. I loved what I did. I decided to take my love of acting into a serious hobby, joined theater groups that performed on commercial stages, and eventually took it to do good in the form of medical clowning.
There are many places in your professional life where your limiting beliefs are holding you back.
Today I want to focus on a less trivial one: during your OKR planning. These beliefs are not about relationships or situations but are beliefs about what OKRs should be.
OKRs are meant to bring your dreams into reality.
If you don’t eliminate these limiting beliefs, you are left with a lot of reality that shapes and limits your dreams, and not vice versa.
Here are 5 things to put aside when you plan your OKRs. You’ll figure them out later on.
When I work with my clients on building their OKRs, this is a limiting belief that is hitting the surface right away.
I force them to think about what it takes to fulfill their vision and goals, and they give a good answer, but then caveat it with “but I can’t measure it”.
I know you can’t, and that’s ok.
The whole point of OKRs is to go beyond what’s measurable and into what we are trying to achieve (hence objective). If you only allow yourself to achieve something that is strictly measurable, you are limiting yourself to very specific outcomes.
More severely, you might miss this way the real outcomes that are needed in order to achieve your goals. The world we live in is only partially represented by numbers and metrics, that’s the whole point of OKRs as opposed to a pure KPI approach.
Give yourself the freedom to think about the objective that you need, regardless if you can measure it later or not.
OKRs are a good way to translate long-term goals into tangible pieces and a good working pace. Most companies plan their OKRs quarterly.
But when you plan your OKRs and force yourself to only think about what fits into the upcoming quarter, you will often miss the bigger picture.
OKRs should help us translate a strategy into action, but many companies skip the strategy part and are left with short-term, tactical planning only.
OKR planning is an opportunity to go back to that strategic level, and strategic goals take time to reach.
Eventually, your OKRs should be quarterly, because that’s what gives you the working pace and progress. But not every OKR has to end within a quarter. You can form a hierarchy that shows you where you are going long-term, and how this long trip is broken down into quarterly goals.
You must talk about these long-term OKRs explicitly, to make sure you are leading the way there quarter by quarter and not just wandering around.
What’s the point in strategic planning if all you are trying to do is lead to your existing plans?
OKR planning is an opportunity to look at your journey with a fresh perspective and ask where you should be going.
What you thought was right 3 months ago might have proved wrong.
You might have learned new things along the way.
The world might have changed.
If your OKR planning is only trying to describe what you already know you are going to do, you are missing a major part of the value of planning — thinking things through and not just organizing them into specific building blocks.
In most cases, most of the OKRs would lead to the plans that you already have. But you must give yourself the freedom to let them lead elsewhere in order to keep yourself honest and uncover any blindspots you might have.
This is a tricky one, that gets us to the real power of eliminating limiting beliefs.
Of course, eventually, the OKRs need to be feasible, or you won’t be able to reach them.
But if you only think about it within the boundaries of feasibility, you might miss what you really need.
It could be that what you really need in order to succeed isn’t feasible at all. How will you identify that if you don’t even allow yourself to think about things that aren’t feasible? Your brain simply won’t go there, and these important insights will remain blind spots.
Once you realize that what you need to succeed includes things that you can’t achieve, don’t be upset. It’s a good thing! Because at least now you know it and you can decide what to do.
At a high level, you have two options: changing your strategy and finding a path that you believe can lead you to your goals, or making the impossible possible and succeeding with the OKRs although they don’t seem feasible at all.
When you go with the latter, remember that simply wanting really hard or working a lot wouldn’t do the trick. I recommend understanding what is it that makes the specific objective not feasible, and trying to work that piece of the puzzle.
In most cases, there is some innovation that you can bring, or looking at things slightly differently that can lead to a desired yet feasible outcome that you couldn’t have thought of without this deeper analysis.
This is a very common limiting belief with product leaders, and even with CEOs when they come to define product OKRs. You think about the product.
But good OKRs are not related to the product, they are related to the company goals.
As a product leader, you can lead everyone to the conclusion that things need to change even beyond the product itself. You must do so if things indeed need to change there.
If that’s what’s needed for success, that’s what’s needed. Ignoring it just because you are not the one to implement it wouldn’t help anyone.
When you think about OKRs, think about them broadly. Break down the company goals into the various components that would need to work together to bring you the results you want. You can do this with other leaders (e.g. marketing, sales) if needed, but don’t let yourself live only within the boundaries of the things that are the easiest for you to impact, namely engineering plans.
Once you eliminate these limiting beliefs, the OKR planning process will turn into a strategic thinking exercise that creates alignment across the company. Trust me, if you do so, you’ll never look back.
