In the article “How OKR Can Completely Motivate employees and Challenge the Impossible”, Miao Hui, head of cloud distribution products at Baishan Cloud Technology Technology Center, mentioned that OKR is a very easy-to-learn management by objectives tool that helps teams focus on what’s really important and helps align their members. But for OKR to make the most of its resources and become a fuel for team effectiveness, it is essential to have a team culture that matches it. In this article, Miao Hui will share his thoughts on OKR landing and cultural soil based on the OKR practice of Baishan Cloud Technology.
I’ve seen companies or teams blindly introduce OKR and end up with nothing to show for it, not only failing to deliver value, but exhausting team members and ultimately failing. It’s a shame. The root cause is that the company deviates from its core value appeal. The meaning of the existence of the company is always to constantly create greater value and achieve better development, and the purpose of management is to stimulate the potential of the team and lead the team to drive the company forward.
Value orientation is the key for OKR to land on the cultural soil
In the process of implementing OKR, managers must have encountered some people who have been unable to write OKR, or the OKR written is just a clear list of actions, or better is a clear list of KPI targets, which is not creative at all. Or maybe OKR writes well and conforms to OKR’s specifications for O and KR, but is not what the company needs right now.
The main reason behind this, on the one hand, is the problem of individual ability, on the other hand, is the problem of team culture. The latter is the focus of our analysis here.
In fact, the essence of a company is a value body. The company needs to continuously create social value in exchange for the improvement of its own value, so as to continue to develop and prosper.
Therefore, the mission of all employees in the company, whether CEO, senior executive, manager or front-line staff, is to give full play to their strengths and create as much value as possible for the company, so that individuals can get a greater degree of return.
So how is value defined?
As for the definition of “value”, you can understand it in this way. It is usually based on the mission and vision of the company, combined with the current situation and development expectation of the company, the decision makers discuss the expectation to be achieved or the problem to be solved (value) in half a year, and then write the target in a formal expression. Once the whole company achieves this goal, it means to achieve the value appeal.
In contrast, the traditional management mode is just like the waterfall development mode of R&D. In order to land on the ground, the target representing value is carefully designed by the management or expert team, broken down into execution plans and expected output goals coordinated by many teams, and then distributed to each team and individual level by level.
With perspective to analyze the process of project management: the company strategic objectives is the demand, the process of dismantling is actually a design process of the implementation of the individual, to get the goal is to perform a development process, a monthly review goal of the project is a complete tracking process, and acceptance of the year, is a process of project integration and online.
However, there are some problems with this process, mainly:
1. One-way target dismantling, which means that there is only one plan designed by managers and expert teams, with high risk;
2. The longer the delivery cycle, the more the target is disassembled, the greater the loss, and the more the task tends to be. It is necessary to wait for many tasks to be completed before the integration at a higher level and the implementation of the target can be restored.
Above, we discussed how to design and disassemble team objectives under traditional management mode, and some problems existed in this process. In the one-way dismantling of team objectives, the more the target is subdivided, the more likely it is to move towards the task, so that the deviation cannot be corrected in a long period.
So how does a value-oriented culture in modern management help OKR land?
The value oriented culture makes OKR possible
In the traditional management mode, the one-way dismantling and reverse rectification of team objectives will consume a lot of time and energy. In an Internet industry with an increasing emphasis on innovation and efficiency, indecision can cause teams to miss opportunities.
When it comes to unifying the team’s goals, one bad move could lose the game. Because of this, OKR allows companies to maximize their effectiveness based on their own characteristics. This enables it to conquer a large number of enterprises with the ultimate pursuit of efficiency and innovation in a very short period of time. I think OKR is really an agile approach to team management that emphasizes three things:
- Focusing on the
The OKR framework explicitly limits the number of O’s and KRS to no more than five. The biggest meaning of this setting is “focus”, and the fundamental purpose is to “let the team face the harsh reality that resources are always limited”.
Only by subtracting over and over again, can we concentrate resources to accomplish great things by sifting out the desired goals and retaining the five core value goals.
- goal-directed
Goals are the carrier of value, and throughout OKR we define and deliver value with goals with minimal information loss.
OKR requires us: KR must be quantifiable and accepted, and by setting the deadline for each KR, we need to put this quantifiable goal into a definite time box.
In other words, writing OKR is a commitment to the team: WHAT value will I deliver at what point in time? In addition, I believe that in the implementation of OKR, when setting your own OKR goals at each stage, top-down communication needs to be combined with bottom-up correction, and target accuracy will be greatly improved.
- Continuous delivery
OKR’s emphasis on continuous review, on a weekly or monthly basis, is really about delivering value on a continuous basis. Because the KR that we define is an acceptable target. And each KR achieved means that the value of its definition is exported. Through review, we look at what the output value is, how close we are to the total value goal, whether we need to make adjustments in the next stage, etc.
Continuous delivery of value in terms of KR achievement
This greatly improves the team’s agility and ability to respond quickly to change. Agile is a very good form, but also very demanding on the team. Every team that implements OKR wants this management approach to take root in the organization and in the values of each member.
However, “the orange is born in Huainan, and the orange is born in Huaibei.” As a matter of fact, OKR is hard to land on all teams. There is a key factor behind this, mainly the lack of a suitable cultural ground for OKR to land in, or more specifically, I think a value-oriented culture.
In fact, in a non-value oriented team, many people do not know what their value is, but considering the salary of the company, they still try their best to work hard every day, but it may not be effective for the work itself. At present, when management implements OKR, they are required to first think clearly about value objectives, deadlines and acceptance criteria.
For team members, either they never thought about it, couldn’t write it at all, or they went back to traditional KPIs and couldn’t help thinking about it
“Give me a break, boss. Just tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll write it down.”
However, in a team with a value-oriented culture, I think it’s natural to use OKR as a tool to formalize and deliver everyday thinking goals.
As I mentioned in my last article, “The traditional ‘authorities’ and’ managers’ are the first to come under critical pressure to implement OKR in the traditional way, because OKR is open to all, and it is easy to identify the correctness and rationality of top-down guidance. So, in the team that implements OKR, managers need to be very open and have the basic perception and attitude that people are more capable than they are.”
In a non-value oriented team, managers can easily become a resistance to OKR reform. In a value-oriented team, the only way to maintain or improve your identity is to consistently deliver higher value. They may be more concerned with leading the team to deliver more value than by delivering their own higher value, or even controlling the team, as a means of maintaining and asserting their identity.
In my opinion, if a team wants to create a value-oriented cultural atmosphere, the only way to do this is to publicize THE OKR, conduct targeted discussions and coordinate various ideas. Only in this way can we find a reasonable value goal and achieve the GOAL O more smoothly.
So value orientation is so good, to create a value-oriented cultural atmosphere, how should be done to achieve?
How do you create a value-oriented culture?
When I say “creation”, I don’t mean something out of thin air. In a larger sense, it means to rediscover the inner strength of the enterprise. In my opinion, value-oriented culture is inherent in enterprises, because the necessary condition for enterprises to survive is to continuously create value.
Usually within a 10 people of entrepreneurial teams, value orientation is very in place, everyone is consciously, spontaneously with value orientation as the criterion, everyone knows the survival condition of the company, and the pressure of the company and need, all in best for the company development, and also the one who fish in troubled waters will soon be identified and ejected from the team.
As the health of the company gets better and better, the team will get bigger and bigger. Many people will not understand the core value goals of the company, and the core value goals of the team, and over time, the value-oriented culture will gradually lose.
This is why OKR is often seen as a great fit for small startup teams, whereas it is often difficult to implement and land for large, mature companies. In these large companies, it is often the case that the closer you get to the top, the more value-oriented you become. That’s why OKR requires a strong authority from the top down to be successful.
In a word, if we want to build a value-oriented culture, we must return to our original intention and use value to speak for everything, and in the distribution of value, we should also be scientific and reasonable. Just like Huawei’s “striver oriented”, we want to make the value exporter become the beneficiary in the company, the higher the output value, the greater the benefit.
In my opinion, the most important thing is that the company’s value evaluation system should have the corresponding value traction and reward the rich rewards to the team or individual with high output value. The higher the output value is, the higher the return will be.
conclusion
OKR is arguably the best value-oriented management model I’ve ever used, simple and agile enough to complement a value-oriented culture.
Value-oriented culture is the necessary soil for THE landing of OKR. Meanwhile, the implementation and promotion of OKR is also the continuous strengthening and consolidation of value-oriented culture, and finally the landing of OKR. On the other hand, in a non-value-oriented team, managers can easily become a resistance to OKR reform.
How to maximize the value of the team or other organizations is something that managers need to think about all the time. OKR has a mature methodology, but managers can’t stop at the top level and read from the book. Otherwise, OKR will become a mere formality and a burden.
Miao Hui, OKR practitioner of Baishanyun Technology, saw that managers need to cultivate value-oriented cultural soil and take advantage of the situation after identifying team cultural genes. When each member thinks what the team wants, the heart naturally goes where it used to.
Additional questions
To the end of the year, perhaps you and baishan cloud technology partners, vaguely heard the year-end summary of the horn.
Does your team practice OKR? Do you observe any other factors that affect the landing of OKR? Welcome to speak your mind.