Elizabeth here—your WhatMatters.com “wingwoman.” My Objective over the next 12 months is to help you achieve operating excellence using OKRs in 2024. I’ll be in touch each month with signposts for the annual cycle, suggestions on where to focus, and helpful tips to help make 2024 your most audacious yet. 

Let’s jump in—welcome to January! 

At the top of each quarter, I’ll let you know what you should be doing each week as we move through the year. For January, as we get started, you’ll find a diagram of the full annual cycle at the end of this email. Use these quarterly diagrams to align your calendar— are your team meetings and 1:1s scheduled for 2024? 

🗓️ This week and next: Share Your Company OKRs

Now that the new year has started, it’s time to share your Company-level OKRs with your team. Company-level OKRs should capture the ambition of your organization through the Objectives and clearly define what success looks like through the Key Results.

Communicate these top-level OKRs to everyone. Share them via email or put them in a Google Doc so your entire organization sees them at the same time.

You’ll want to have OKRs for the layers in your organization that have committed to crafting OKRs. For some, that’s Company → Department → Team → Individual. For others, it may be a simplified structure, just Company → Department. Your staff meetings are great places for Objectives to be shared and 1:1s are great for honing in on your Key Results.

Aim to be concise and precise. Each OKR “layer” should have no more than 2-3 Objectives with 3-5 Key Results. Every department, team, and person should be able to capture their OKRs on a single page.​

A great OKR aligns with one very important question: Why are we doing this work? A well-communicated mission will not only motivate your team but can also act as a great checkpoint to evaluate your goals. A great OKR allows you to examine its link to the team’s collective values.  

Let’s take one of WhatMatters.com’s team-wide goals as an example: 

Objective: To help another 10,000 teams achieve operating excellence through OKRs together.  

1. This company-level is now an Objective owned by all the leaders on our team.

2. This week, each leader will devise their own set of 2-3 OKRs in support of that company-wide goal.  Those Objectives will guide teams to generate their own corresponding Key Results. 

3. Remember, each KR should be a measurable milestone and/or accomplishment that demonstrates that the Objective has been achieved.

🗓️ Week 3: Focus on Team and Individual OKRs

You want to foster an active culture where questioning is appreciated, and meaningful conversations happen at all levels of your organization. Great organizations need very few Objectives and Key Results at the top. A lot of the detail happens at the next layer and the layer below. And, believe it or not, this is the fun part.

It really does take teamwork to create a great OKR. The truth is, I've been using OKRs for years, and even when I put my own together, they're just okay. They're not great until I actually sit down with Billy, our team’s OKR Shepherd, and iterate them. The OKR process gives leaders at every level of your organization a chance to provide feedback, critique, and guide the company. 

To help prepare for feedback on your draft OKRs, ask yourself the following:

• Is this a committed or aspirational OKR? If aspirational, be bold and ask yourself what you could accomplish if you were free from most constraints.

• Do your individual OKRs link or support your company’s OKRs?

• Can you re-write your OKRs so they clearly convey the value to your organization? 

• If you successfully meet your Key Results, do you achieve your Objective? (You should!)

I’ll be in touch in February to take you through the 1:1 OKR meetings that you’ll need to have with your team as the quarter progresses. We’ll also look at how to capture your team’s efforts and how to monitor your progress.

Our momentum for the year begins here. Let’s get started!

The Measure What Matters OKR Certificate on Coursera 

Looking to level up your OKR skills for 2024? Now is the perfect time to enroll in our Coursera course. Over the course of four weeks, you’ll learn directly from us how to write and use transformative OKRs within your organization. It’s the most comprehensive OKR training ever made!

OKRs: A CEO's Perspective

Nothing levels the playing field quite like having a master plan. When Maxwell Ryan, CEO of Apartment Therapy set up a spreadsheet, labeled simply, “Company OKRs” to track his company’s goals and accomplishments, he essentially gave his entire staff access to the inner workings of the company - and created a blueprint for how an office powered by OKRs should run.

Going From Fear to Freedom With OKRs

Rose Kuo, OKR Coach and Technical Project Manager at TED, understands that OKRs can seem scary at first. Here, Kuo describes common fears around OKR adoption, how to use CFRs to relieve resistance, how tying metrics to Objective empowers cautious teams to take risks, and why measuring matters.