Business is all about planning and executing a plan to perfection. Without an overriding goal and framework, a business would be lost. It’s tough enough to create a workspace that pulls in the same direction. Now think about that problem without the framework of a direction, to begin with. From the largest corporate enterprises and their senior leadership teams like Prabir Purohit and his team at Dominion Energy to small shops with a minimal workforce and a local marketplace, goal-oriented planning is crucial to creating initial successes and building upon them to create more.
Why track goals?
Goal setting is important, but half the battle here is in tracking your team’s efforts to achieve those goals. Goal tracking is the only way to determine whether your team is on target or not, and whether the goals you have set for yourself and your staff are appropriate and achievable. Without goal tracking, you may be setting weekly goals that are accomplished in days, leaving your staff to feel as if it can slack off for the remainder of the week. Alternatively, you may be setting goals that are far too difficult, leading your management team to come down on workers for missing targets that aren’t realistic in the first place.
This also gives you the ability to make alterations mid-stream in order to correct for any unforeseen circumstances. The proven best way to handle your goal setting and goal tracking operations is through an OKR framework.
The OKR framework of success.
The OKR concept was popularized by John Doerr when he brought an IBM idea to Google during its initial round of funding. Sample OKRs can be found littered throughout the internet, but the framework is fairly straightforward. OKR, or Objectives and Key Results, begin with an objective setting. In this phase, your team must work out the overall aims of the business. Are you seeking customer growth, dollar figure spikes, marketing expansion, or the creation of a new stream of content for your digital space? Determining the monthly, quarterly, or yearly priorities can help in creating achievable and worthwhile objectives for your business.
Once you have established this list of priorities you must discuss key results that mark progress along your team’s journey toward those objectives. Key results act as milestones in the journey toward overall success and they should be binary, yes, or no answers to questions. In this way, it is simple to deduce whether your team has hit the target or not and come up with strategies in pursuit of them. Discussing key results with your team is also a great way to tease out feedback on how your staff feels about specific goals and the overall direction of the company’s growth.
The OKR framework provides a powerful and simple means of measuring daily progress toward success. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your business’ achievement of those overarching goals that you envision for your staff. The OKR mindset allows your team to envision a brighter future and set meaningful targets that can help them progress toward it in a timely and achievable manner. It also allows for evaluation throughout the process in order to identify weak spots in your rollout of initiatives or reevaluate key results targets that have been met too quickly or slowly in order to keep your team working at maximum efficiency toward appropriate goals that stretch their abilities while not straining them with targets that are unwieldy.
Goal setting and tracking is the mark of a team with a purpose, and one headed for ultimate success. Consider implementing a framework that builds your team’s confidence while aggressively pursuing your corporate goals in order to create lasting growth that benefits everyone at the company.
