A Brief Guide to Goal Setting or How to Set Goals and Achieve Them
Author of the article: Kirill Lavrenyuk
IT HR
This material will help your team identify key goals and create an action plan to achieve them. In this article, we will review the main concepts, discuss how to set goals, provide examples, analyze the main steps for implementation, and describe a typical goal-setting cycle.
What is a goal and goal setting?
Target – this is what a team or company wants to achieve at a certain time. There is always a general goal of the company, which is divided into several other, more specific ones.
Goal setting – is the process of defining these goals, developing a strategy to achieve the goals and breaking them down. Goal setting plays an important role in helping us navigate, motivate and progress.
Why do we need goals?
Goal setting in a company has several important functions:
Determining the direction of development:
Goals help you understand where your team should be heading, what areas you should improve, or what products and services you should offer. Goals also help you stay focused on your top priorities.Employee motivation:
Clearly defined goals allow employees to understand what is expected of them and motivate them to work towards achieving them, which helps create a more focused and effective work environment.Evaluation of results:
Clearly defined goals make it easy to measure the progress and results of your team's work. This allows you to track your achievements and adjust your strategies according to the results.Resource Alignment:
Goals will help you determine what resources are needed to achieve those goals and how best to allocate them across different departments, products, and projects.Creating a corporate culture:
Clear goals and development directions will help create a corporate culture that supports the achievement of these goals and makes the company attractive to new employees.
Run vs Change commands
All teams and processes in a company can be divided into two types: Run And Change:
Run – these are processes, teams that are mainly aimed at maintaining what we already have. Examples of run tasks: ensuring quality of services, infrastructure management, code review. Run processes provide service to clients and earn money.
Change – these are processes, commands that are aimed at changing the current state of affairs. With the help of change tasks, the company develops and moves forward. Examples of change tasks: create a FAQ with answers to frequently asked questions, implement a code writing standard to reduce errors. Change processes create new and develop existing services and business processes of the company, that is, they change the company.
So, change is what moves us forward, and run is what prevents us from going backwards. Both are important and affect the success of the company.
Goals in Run and Change
IN Run commands Goals are usually related to maintaining and improving current processes and products, as well as preventing potential problems. This may include conducting regular monitoring and auditing, fixing errors, improving performance, etc.
For such commands, for example, the system can be used KPI (Key Performance Indicator)which allows you to identify clear indicators without which it is impossible to achieve your goals.
IN Change-commandswhere more significant changes occur frequently, the KPI system can become too limited. For this purpose, it is proposed to use OKR (Objectives and Key Results) – is a goal-setting methodology that helps teams and companies identify strategic priorities and achieve alignment in their work.
Next, we suggest trying to work within the logic of setting OKRs.
More about OKR
The OKR system consists of 3 components:
O – objectives – ambitious goals that can be measured using:
KR – key results – key results
Initiatives – initiatives or tasks to achieve these goals
In other words:
Goals answer the question “For what?”,
Key Results to the question “How?”,
Initiatives – “What exactly needs to be done to achieve this?”.
OKR criteria
There shouldn't be many goals and results.
It is better to choose 3-5 main goals and set 3-5 key results for each of them.Goals are set from top to bottom and from bottom to top
Management sets the company's goals, but teams develop their own goals. Then managers check and agree on them.Discussion
Even if goals are set by managers, give employees the opportunity to discuss key results so they are more involved in the goal achievement process.Flexibility
Objectives and key results may change during the process if they are no longer relevant or require revision due to changing external conditions.Goals may be too high
Ambitious goals, even if they are not fully achieved, lead the organization to a new level. The main thing in this case is to let employees understand that mistakes are not scary, and that thanks to such goals they were able to do much more than they could imagine.Any new system requires training and adaptation.
Learning how to set goals and identify key results correctly will take time.
Setting OKRs with an example
The OKR method seems simple and straightforward, but in practice, most people have difficulty setting goals and choosing key results.
Goal setting
Goal checklist:
understandable to all participants;
short and memorable;
correspond to the culture and common language of communication within the company;
reflect a qualitative improvement;
are set for a quarter or six months;
take into account the current position of the company;
will lead to the fulfillment of the company's more global goals.
Which example do you think meets all the OKR criteria?
Become one of the top five most popular apps in the App Store charts;
Tear apart competitor X;
Achieve a significant lead over competitors;
Maintain market position.
Ask questions:
Become one of the top five most popular apps in the App Store charts
Are there any prerequisites? In which countries? Is it hypothetically possible in a quarter or is this a goal from the category of “conquer the world tomorrow”?Tear apart competitor X
Is it in line with the culture of communication? Does it make anyone uncomfortable to pronounce the goal? Where are you now and what was the growth dynamics?Achieve a significant lead over competitors
Will employees be able to repeat this goal? And keep it in their heads?Maintain a position in the market
Where will we end up? In “support”? Is it clear to everyone what qualitative improvement we want to achieve?
Let's say we chose “to tear apart competitor X”The next step is to define key results: how will we do this?
Setting Key Results
Key Results Checklist:
specific;
measure the target;
clearly lead to the achievement of the goal;
they are easy to calculate;
reflect the completed result, not the process;
you can do frequent checks “along the way”;
slightly raised to create a sense of challenge.
How will we know when we are ahead of our competitor?
Examples of possible key results:
Increase app installs by 50%
If we reach this figure by the end of the quarter, we will significantly overtake the competitor in terms of downloads. We can track progress every week.Achieve an average user rating of 4.7 stars
We will overtake the competitor in the ranking, we will get a more advantageous position in the chart. We can measure the improvement every two weeks.We will release a new feature before Y date
An ambiguous KR, but it takes place on the condition that the feature is urgently needed by customers and it will provide an undeniable competitive advantage over competitor X. We can control the development process, check the deadlines.
Key Steps to Implement OKR
Define the company's goals for the year: The company's goals should be defined and agreed upon at the highest level. Based on them, you will be able to determine the main priorities for your team. These priorities will serve as ideas for setting goals.
Decompose goals: The company's goals should then be broken down into more specific goals for each team or division, and then divided into time periods. This process should take into account the company's strategic priorities and the team's capabilities. There is no need to set many goals, as this will cause loss of focus and none of the goals will be achieved. The optimal number is 3-5 per quarter.
Discuss and agree on goals: Each team should discuss and agree on their goals, this will help ensure that everyone understands them and their role in achieving them. It is also important to remember that 60-70% of goals are set by the teams themselves, but they do not just appear, i.e. an important OKR principle cannot be missed – the publicity of all goals. Synchronization with other departments is essential. At the same time, setting your goals only depending on the goals of others is also a bad idea.
Generate key results: For each objective, it is necessary to define key results that will serve as indicators of progress towards achieving the objective. Key results should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
Record goals and key results: For this you can use the following draft:
Establish an action plan (initiative) and identify those responsible for achieving key results. Each team member must define their own action plan that will help the team achieve common goals. Initiatives can be carried out in any order or in parallel. This is not a step-by-step list where actions must be performed in a strict sequence. Initiatives are compiled for key results. Take a key result and make a list of tasks that will help lead to the desired result. It is not necessary to write all the tasks at once, 3-4 are enough, the rest can be added later. Tasks can affect several key results at once.
Monitoring and feedback: Regularly monitor progress towards goals and key results and provide feedback both within and across teams.
Adjust goals: If key results are not achieved or exceeded, objectives should be reviewed and adjusted.
Typical OKR cycle
Setting goals and key resultsagreeing on them and fixing them for the quarter. Teams develop their own OKRs using the approach described above.
Next the team puts several tasks (initiatives) for a monthfocusing on quarterly OKRs.
The team organizes weekly check-ins to track results and initiatives.
For companies using quarterly OKRs, it is recommended to conduct OKR review at the end of each month.
At the end of the cycle you can carry out retrospective/discussion lessons learned to move on to a new cycle. The easiest way to organize a retrospective is in the start-stop-continue format. In this model, each team member is asked to identify specific things the team should: Start doing / Stop doing / Continue doing.
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