How Teams Benefit From OKRs
“Controls in a social situation …are goal-setting and value setting.” – Peter Drucker
Coaches look to control the actions, decision-making and interactions of their teams. Many coaches attempt to do this through the force of personality; the reality is this is not effective or lasting. What does work is clearly setting and communicating the objectives and values they have for the team.
This understanding of the objectives, or why, and the values, or the guiding principles, is what enables team members to align with the outcome and the how the coach desires.
A great resource for this is using the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework.
OKRs are a structured form of goal setting that helps individuals and teams receive the performance enhancements that can be found from goal setting (see Locke 1967).
Effectively setting OKRs achieves two things; the objective defines the focus and intensity allowing people to not work on unimportant or irrelevant and key results provide the feedback and measurements that eliminate the performance gain from setting goals when the goals are either non-existent or too vague (see goal setting theory page 5)
Absent of feedback there is no performance gains.
Sports teams typically default to outcome OKRs and eliminate setting performance goals (measuring against a defined standard they set for themselves) and process goals (learning skills for improving performance).
The great teams measure against self-imposed standards that allow them to explore the best way to achieve the objectives based on the reality of their current situation.
OKRs when used properly create not only clarity for team members, they create empowerment and collective ownership of results. The eliminate the feeling of subjectivity that frustrates many team members and creates an understanding of the shared responsibility for achieving the OKRs.
If you are interested in learning more about how to develop and deploy an OKR framework for you team go to TeamSHEP.co to start accessing proven resources for increasing your teams performance to your expectations.
