20 experts describe the company culture that creates great OKR

2022-02-11 15:45:00

So, you've decided to use the OKR framework, but have you taken the time to consider whether your current company culture and structure are suitable for OKR?

To make sure you're ready, we asked our OKR experts if they knew what cultural or structural similarities were in common that could create the perfect environment for a successful promotion of OKR.

The main cultural and structural similarities are summarized below:

An environment that promotes psychological safety
A team that is not afraid to fail in order to facilitate learning
A solid foundation of management principles
A clear, communicative reason to start implementing OKR
Understanding implementation takes time and will not have a perfect result in the first few quarters
A structure that can already be considered transparent
A culture of respect with a clear mission

20 experts describe the company culture that creates great OKR

Read all the answers from OKR experts below:

Cansel Sörgens, Business Coach, OKR Coach and Trainer

The only similarity I've observed is that they both have a strong will and an open mind and work hard to truly transform into a better version of themselves. We ourselves have created a culture of organization. In other words, our behavior determines the culture. This means creating an environment that enables psychological safety, empowerment, and consistent autonomy, because a healthy OKR system is in our hands. What it needs is leadership that is willing to go through this transformation on their own.

Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus author, OKR expert, consultant and lecturer at Stanford University

obvious! A healthy culture is overpowered by OKR! Toxic cultures will do OKR theater. Successful companies have a psychological sense of security, a clear mission and strategy, are not afraid of failure, and serve learning.

Mukom Tamon, Chief Excellence Officer™️ Academy, OKRs, 4DX & Lean Six Sigma expert (@perfexcellent)

They are committed to excellence – OKR is just one means of achieving excellence
They have a proven track record of measuring what matters
Managers are already practicing effective management principles such as 1:1, feedback, empowerment and coaching.
If an organization is already process-centric, it's easier for them to make the leap to OKR

Paul Niven is a global OKR coach and OKR author

OKR can play a role in almost any organizational structure. Culturally, the belief in growing through learning and experimentation is certainly helpful. In addition, there are several things that are best practices that OKR organizations do very well.

They have a clear, compelling reason to adopt OKR so that people know it's not a "taste of the month" idea.
They have a top patron (preferably the CEO) dedicated to OKR
They have an internal champion who manages the OKR program, as well as a group of ambassadors who coach, mentor, and support OKR.

Monica Batsleer, Senior Partner at OKR Matrix

Every company can implement OKR, but we noticed some cultural similarities in deep communication, coordination, non-hierarchical structures, and some other capabilities to promote an agile environment in organizations that do well.

Omid Akhavan, OKR coach at OKRs.com

Yes, some of these similarities include:

Promotes the contrast between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation such as bonuses and incentives
Create a safe environment for innovation, risk-taking and failure
Focus on lessons learned, not rigorous scoring or even blame
Make OKR and strategic goals visible to all employees
Promote cross-functional goal setting, collaboration and accountability
Involve the team broadly in developing OKRs (more bottom-up than top-down).
Start key meetings with OKR (e.g., plenary sessions, leadership meetings, business reviews).
Ensure that the team has the power and autonomy needed to achieve OKR.
Extend the target to the optimal level to boost growth without stifling momentum
Celebrate victories, share success stories, and recognize people who perform well.

Allan Kelly, Agile OKR Coach and OKR Author

It's a tricky question, and if you look at the well-known OKR success stories – Intel and Google are common examples – you'll see that OKR started early. This raises the question: Is OKR creating culture? Or is the company succeeding in OKR because it has a compatible culture? Chances are, your organization doesn't subscribe to the "Google" culture, so are you working on changing that culture or using OKR in a way that works with your culture? Right now, I haven't seen enough examples of traditional companies successfully adopting OKR, so I don't know what the common success factors are.

Madeleine Silva, OKR Coach and Trainer

I guess it may depend, but in my experience, such an environment would help if companies foster a psychologically safe environment where people can interpret their point of view without fear of being punished or making mistakes in order to learn quickly. Also, be consistent with this process because we need to understand that we are trying to develop a new habit in the team.

Christina Lange, OKR coach and speaker

A culture of openness and curiosity, true servant leadership, and how to deal with failure.

Carsten Ley, OKR Goal Setting Coach

Most companies that do well with OKRs already have a medium or high level of agility, openness, results orientation, and transparency. Companies in particular that have shifted from a top-down, fragmented KPI environment to OKR are struggling to adopt the change management required for OKR. Because OKR empowers employees, we see resistance coming more from senior or middle management than at the employee level, as managers lose authority and authority because of a transparent, measurable, performance process focused on cross-functional teams and outcomes.

Saba Ghafari, OKR coach and organizational development specialist

Results-oriented
Have a culture of knowledge sharing
Innovative way of thinking
Strive for excellence
Be agile
Solidarity and collaboration

Richard Russell, OKR and Leadership Coach

Once they start doing well, yes! Doing it well involves decentralizing many decisions, empowering employees, creating a clear strategy, and often matching the customer or task-centric organization. These tend to reinforce each other, and OKRs tie everything together. If companies try to maintain centralized command and control, or are unwilling to make tough strategic decisions, or don't focus on their customers, they don't reap the benefits.

Bart Den Haak, consultant and OKR author

Yes, definitely. They are all task-oriented companies, and people in these organizations truly believe that people will do the right thing for their company. They all have high-performing agile teams that are able to deliver high-value software in production multiple times at the highest quality, and they understand the power of experimentation.

Paul Barker, OKR and Strategy Coach

Of course. Well, it depends on the reason for deploying OKRs:

If OKR is used as a method of ranking and rating individuals, and subsequently motivating and rewarding them, then it is not.
If OKR is a mechanical way of organizing teams and passing goals down from the top, then not.
We believe that both of these reasons lead to poor deployments and friction within the team, leaving a bad smell in the room when OKR is mentioned.
However, if it is to be used to help teams work together and create organic conversations, there needs to be a cultural similarity
OKR is a results-based approach to goal management. Results-based management is impossible without trust, and with trust comes vulnerability, psychological safety and increased communication. That's the culture you need to do well okr

Kenneth Paul Lewis, Co-Founder and Director of OKR International, Angel Investor and Leadership Coach

yes! Most importantly, there is a feeling:

Pride in the organization and its goals
A shared set of values and beliefs that promote collaboration, autonomy, transparency, ambition and results-orientation
Authentic and servant leadership style
Structures that facilitate rapid decision-making, as well as open communication
Practices centered around learning, personal development, psychological safety, rhythmic discipline, and challenging the status quo

Mike Burrows, pioneer of lean, agile and Kanban

Culturally, respect individuals and teams while expecting them to make the breakthroughs they need when they have the opportunity. Structurally, be flexible enough to allow the structure to find its own balance as needs change. Happily, both of these attributes are also those of organizations that are good at nurturing talent, and this may not be a coincidence.

Brad Dunn, Chief Product Officer and AUTHOR of OKR books

I think so too. It seems that companies that are good at using OKR tend to be good at admitting that things they've been working on for a while aren't working, and it's okay to change direction in order to achieve their goals. Sometimes, this is referred to as program continuity bias, and companies affected by this tend to be more allergic to OKRs.

Richard, TitaokR coach

Openness, agile way of thinking, safe space for discussion, no obsession with bonuses. Be prepared to learn from failure, have no culture of blame, and take risks.

Khalil Medina, CEO and OKR Coach

Use OKR for at least 5 quarters (this is the learning curve).

Jean-Luc Koning, OKR & Systemic Coach, founder of OkrConsulting.fr

What we observe at In Excelsis is that both medium-sized and large enterprises are interested in implementing OKR. It now appears that OKR has gained the same level of interest on both sides. However, it has been noted that there are differences in the way they treat OKRs. For the first type of business (small and medium-sized enterprises), once this method is discovered, their initial reaction is to directly launch an on-premise attempt after reading one or two related books.

Many times, they realize that even though the concept of OKR is easy to understand, it is harder than expected to install and make it work. Therefore, in the second phase, these companies tend to tend to seek support after the first semi-failure. On the other hand, companies of the second category (large groups) tend to call on external experts immediately. Typically, they first pilot it in a sub-part of the company and then promote the practice throughout the company.

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