Welcome to the fourth part of this series titled “5 Ways OKRs Will Fuck Up Your Organization and Why That’s Wonderful.”
- In the first part, we looked at how OKRs will expose your lack of strategy.
- In the second part, we explored how OKRs will expose your inability to describe outcomes.
- The third part examined how OKRs will expose challenges working across functions and departments.
This part explains how OKRs will expose your teams’ inability to generate results autonomously. Let’s dive into it!
OKRs’ Effect on Management
Outcome-focused OKRs help create alignment by showing what the expected results are supposed to look like. They don’t specify how to get there and what work needs to be done. They allow teams to find their own solutions and try different approaches until they find one that delivers the desired results. This is intentional!
This shift towards a management style that provides extreme clarity regarding results but also gives a lot of freedom regarding the way there clashes with many organizational conventions. Both managers and teams struggle with this. And yet, it’s worthwhile to push for more team autonomy.
The Benefits of Autonomy
Like transparency, flexibility, or cross-functionality, autonomy isn’t inherently superior or even desirable in every single case. The degree of autonomy that works best depends on many factors in an organization. At the same time, the best teams I have worked with enjoyed a pretty high degree of autonomy.
Autonomy can:
- lead to better results: autonomous teams are often much more tuned in to market and customer demands and come up with more creative solutions to satisfy them.
- foster agency, accountability, and a sense of purpose: knowing exactly what results you’re responsible for can be very motivating. Many professionals enjoy this more than being told exactly what to do. In the case of the latter, people will often deliver only what’s expected, nothing more, nothing less, regardless of the actual outcomes.
- develop better teams long-term: a direct connection between actions and results leads to better learning. Teams can figure out what works and what doesn’t and develop skills accordingly.
- free up time for management to focus on more important things: not micromanaging all the time allows you to focus on strategy and the development of your employees. This is exactly what the overwhelming amount of managers I work with want.
- increase the speed of decision-making: since information can be processed directly and doesn’t need to be passed up the chain of command, decisions can be made more quickly. The people in direct contact with markets and customers often have much more experience with these types of problems anyway.
Trouble on the Horizon
Of course, it’s not enough to simply talk about autonomy. It’s much more difficult than that in reality. The question of autonomy is influenced by deeply held beliefs and values. To understand why this poses a recurring challenge, let’s go back in time.
Scientific Management
People often forget how different the world of work looked during the Industrial Revolution. In his book “The Third Wave” Alvin Toffler describes how principles that we absolutely take for granted like standardization, centralization, specialization, synchronization, and centralized decision-making were break-through achievements back then. This was also the time when the profession of management was formalized for the first time.
Managers during the Industrial Revolution often knew much better than the unlearned employees how to perform tasks in the factory optimally. Their job was to teach people the quickest way of finishing each step of the manufacturing process and ensuring optimal efficiency. Autonomy was deliberately kept to a minimum.
This management style led to massive productivity improvements. It was absolutely adequate for its time. It is absolutely inadequate for a lot of the work we face today.
Knowledge Work
The dynamic between management and employees has changed dramatically with the rise of knowledge work. Nowadays, employees are highly skilled and specialized. They often work in cross-functional teams. They know what they’re doing. They don’t need tight supervision, they can handle a lot more autonomy. But they do need orientation.
And this is exactly where OKRs come in. They create alignment and clarity by specifying the results people are working towards. They are not a plan or a roadmap focused on tasks or activities. In that way, they foster autonomy. OKRs done well communicate the following message: “We trust you to achieve the results that you committed to. You’re free to find your own way of how to get there.” Tasks and activities can be derived iteratively from OKRs, they don’t need to be specified upfront.
While teams working with OKRs enjoy more autonomy they owe the rest of the company transparency regarding their progress towards those goals. They are responsible for achieving the outcomes they commit to. It’s not enough to highlight how busy they were or how hard they have worked if the results aren’t there. As the title of John Doerr’s book says: Measure What Matters!
Micromanagement
In most organizations I work with, OKRs are focused on activities and outputs, as we already examined in the previous blog posts. Describing outcomes is difficult as it is, but there’s an extra dimension that is often not obvious: focusing on tasks is a popular form of micromanagement. A lot of managers don’t trust their teams to achieve outcomes on their own. Without this trust, working with outcome-focused OKRs becomes tricky. That is not to say that trust is all you need. Far from it. But if it’s not there, then you can forget about the rest.
The Ability to Work Autonomously
Introducing OKRs can (and probably should) trigger a pretty big shift in the way teams take on responsibility. However, if they have never enjoyed this type of autonomy before, it’s unlikely that they’ll thrive immediately.
What To Do Now
While a shift towards increased autonomy is difficult there are things you can do. Here are three suggestions:
- If you’re a manager and have been mandating OKRs, stop it. Some people think of OKRs as a way to have better control of people and increase their performance. “I’ll just set really ambitious goals for these people and then they’ll have to deliver,” they think. But OKRs are not contracts between managers and employees. They are negotiated, not mandated.
- If you’re a manager, talk to your teams about a possible increase in autonomy. Have conversations, one-to-one if needed, to see how people feel about this. In my experience, quite a few people like being guided. Working more autonomously feels daunting to them. This is something you’ll have to respect. If a team does want to take on the extra responsibility and shift their focus, check in with them continuously to see how it’s going and what they need to be successful. Usually, if it’s not going well, they lack skills, knowledge or connections within the company.
If you’re a team member, talk to your manager about a possible increase in autonomy. Highlight the benefits. Explain what will be possible. Talk about the potential dangers openly. Name the things you will need to make this a beneficial change. - If you’re a manager, provide clarity on the boundaries of autonomy. In my experience, you can never specify these exactly. Instead, you can follow a Min Specs approach: identify the few things that your team(s) absolutely must or must not do. The team will enjoy autonomy within these boundaries.
If you’re a team member, ask your manager to describe the boundaries of autonomy using the same approach. This will provide a foundation for further discussions about extending those boundaries or any help you need to do your job well within them.
Remember that this is a long journey. You won’t be successful overnight, but you can make significant progress quickly. This will let you enjoy the benefits outlined above.
