“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” – Andrew Carnegie
In today’s continually growing environment, the norms of team management are also changing. From making sure that goals are achieved, it has now evolved to motivating their teams to attain more meaningful goals.
Team goals are usually divided by a blurry line of what they want to do and what they can do. If your team is mismanaged, the line will become more apparent with time.
Apart from micromanaging and communicating effectively, it is essential to set goals where your entire team is motivated to work headstrong for the same mission.
This is where OKRs- Objective & Key Results can help product managers to enhance their team’s alignment, productivity and transparency.
Here are a few ways OKRs can help Managers to improvise on Team Management.
Communication Tool
“Communication and communication strategy is not just part of the game - it is the game”- Oscar Munoz.
Often in large organizations, communication is considered as a considerable onus for managers.
Communication is the way information shared throughout the workplace, ensuring a mutual understanding about the company’s vision amongst employees. It is a crucial tool in team building and extracting the threshold potential of team members.
Using OKR as a communication tool, many managers are changing the dynamics of strategic communication. When an organization uses OKRs in every area, it keeps every individual informed about priorities and hence, cross-department reporting is eased out.
Be it two software development teams or marketing and sales; if all the OKRs are shared, they have a better understanding of what a particular department is upto. Therefore, making productive interdependencies and strategic communication a lot easier.
Clear Direction
In the current fast-paced development environment, it is vital to have clear roadmap before you start working on something aggressively. Managers structure ambitious goals but with an unclear understanding of how to achieve it.
OKR framework bridges this gap to success by providing a clear view of the final destination (Objective) and also steps to reach the mountaintop(Key Results).
If your team has a clear view of what do they want to accomplish in the next Quarter, their quality of work is also enhanced by focusing on what matters. OKRs allow the managers to help their team prioritize the critical goals and motivates them to work harder.
Accountability
OKR follows the bottom-up methodology of setting goals, hence it provides employees with an opportunity to define the goals, furthermore taking the ownership of problems. If your team feels they have greater responsibilities and are part of something bigger than themselves, it automatically results in better outcomes.
OKRs collaborative approach to define the goals and KRs involves employee engagement at every level, providing them with a sense of authority for their work.
This framework can cut some slack off managers, explaining the top priority, when, what and other deadlines. The brainstorming session of setting up OKRs with the team does all the work. In the end, everyone’s a player working towards a milestone.
Strategic Alignment
Great managers invest quality time in aligning their team to company goals for productive and goal-driven activities.
At times there is a disconnect between the goals of management and how day-to-day business is carried out by the employees. When this becomes apparent, it may be time for a brainstorming session.
OKR is a perfect way to skip these sessions while keeping your team on track with your company’s goals and objectives. By aligning individual OKRs and team OKRs with the company’s long term goals, you can quantify the productivity of the team while keeping them focused.
Objective and Key Results is a technique of implementation. It enhances the working of a team by heightening the level of trust, communication, autonomy and alignment, and these are reflected both in leadership and team management.
With a clear understanding of this goal-setting framework works, companies as a whole can improvise on the flow of efficiency and engagement across departments, quantify their goals, increase team member’s potential and fulfill team-management specifics.