OKRs for Senior Leadership

Modern companies expect their senior leaders to:
  1. Align their teams to company goals.
  2. Communicate company vision, mission, values and goals to their teams.
  3. Coach line managers.
  4. Amplify the company culture.

Learn how senior leaders can use OKRs to drive alignment & create a robust feedback culture.

OKRs for Senior Leadership

Align

According to a Harvard Business Review, companies with highly aligned employees are more than twice as likely to be top performers.

According to a poll of global CEOs, lack of alignment is the number one obstacle to executing a growth strategy.

Using OKRs, modern, agile organizations encourage a healthy balance between alignment and autonomy, common purpose, and creative latitude.
💡Pro-tip: 100% autonomy is utopian. A 70-30 mix of top-down and bottom-up goals help teams innovate and thrive.
Align

Communicate

Communication is an essential tool for leadership. Communication transcends department silos and organizational politics.

According to research, lack of communication of top-down goals is a major reason for the gap between strategy and execution.

Learn how leaders can communicate with Campaigns on Huminos and gauge the reactions and sentiments to their communication.
💡Pro-tip: Targeting of campaigns helps in better communication.
Communicate

Coach

Modern organizations expect leaders to coach their line managers.

Good leaders are astutely aware that a strong cadence of 1:1 conversations is critical for coaching and mentoring.
💡Pro-tip: In their 2019 Harvard Business Review article, Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular discuss the various types of coaching styles: Directive, Laissez-faire, Nondirective, and Situational.

According to the authors, leaders should first practice non-directional style until it becomes almost second nature, and only then start to balance with periods of helpful directive coaching.
Coach

Analyse

The power of OKRs is their ability to present near real time progress against business objectives. Leaders should analyse OKRs progress and proactively intervene to remove any blockers.
💡Pro-tip: The Huminos platform provides multiple dashboards to analyse OKRs. Leaders should certainly track the confidence levels of achieving OKRs and Key Results that are at risk.
Analyse

Calibrate

Calibration is an important part of the performance review process where leaders discuss a line manager’s review of their team’s performance. Companies such as Google and Facebook use committees made up of skip-level managers within various teams, as well as human resource partners.

A good leader must ensure that a robust and transparent calibration process is in place.
💡Pro-tip: Allow line managers to defend performance extremes i.e. significantly above expectations and significantly below expectations.
Calibrate

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