Most OKR failures don't happen in execution. They happen the moment an executive team writes its objectives down and treats the job as finished. In this episode of the Team Check-In, host Emre Ok sits down with Tim Newbold, an OKR coach who has helped more than 70 CEOs put the framework to work, to unpack why goal setting keeps landing on middle managers when it should start at the top.
Tim explains what separates a real OKR from a dressed-up to-do list, why weekly check-ins should feel like the bare minimum, and how one global brand went from seven competing OKRs to a single point of focus and posted 33% sales growth in a quarter. He also gets into stretch goals and the 70% rule, why cascading goals down an org chart backfires, and the quarterly playback rhythm that keeps teams aligned.
1. Every OKR should solve a problem. If it reads like a task list, it isn't an OKR. Write the objective like a newspaper headline that announces the outcome you want.
2. Focus beats coverage. Domino's narrowed seven OKRs to one shared priority and saw 33% sales growth in a single quarter.
3. Weekly should feel like the bare minimum. If this is your top priority, talking about it once a week is barely enough. Set-and-forget is where most OKRs quietly die.
4. Aim for roughly 70% attainment. Hitting 100% every time signals sandbagging. Build in stretch and treat failure as where the learning happens.
5. Alignment beats cascading. Pushing goals down an org chart creates misaligned incentives. Teams should align through strategic context instead.
6. When a team stalls, look upstream. The cause is usually a leadership decision, not the team. Leaders coach people to find their blind spots rather than solving the problem for them.
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Emre (00:00.151)
and then it uploads it to a cloud.
Tim (00:00.631)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, all familiar with this, mate. All good to rock and roll. Let me just get myself. OK, keeping that tab open. Let me just quickly sound check, Let's make sure.
Emre (00:09.724)
All right.
Emre (00:18.193)
Yeah.
Tim (00:27.616)
speakers good all right i think we're cool to rock and roll
Emre (00:34.262)
Alright, perfect. Did you get a chance to look at like the outline I sent you yesterday? Yeah, perfect. Alright, perfect. So let me just make some final adjustments on.
Tim (00:38.91)
I did, I did. So we can just hammer through that if you like and yeah, I can help.
Emre (00:51.228)
Let me just make some... I don't think I have any of those. Alright. So, I don't... I like... Yeah, I have one for friends' weddings and one for funerals and that's about it.
Tim (00:52.078)
Put on a shirt just for you.
Tim (00:58.254)
We got one there.
Tim (01:03.886)
you mean you don't? Yeah, No, that's all good. You don't need one.
Tim (01:13.902)
I like it. A bit of both.
Emre (01:16.796)
Yeah, yeah, and the fancy jacket my dad got me for high school after graduating high school and that's it. thank God I didn't bulk up or grow ever since that. Okay, so.
Tim (01:24.674)
Yeah, nice. That's good.
Tim (01:32.152)
Yeah, I've had that problem now. I've been, I've been focusing on my training like for age, I've always done my training, but just like pretty lazy, but likely I've been dialing it up and now none of my clothes fit me. So it's like, it's a good bulk up, but not an ideal.
Emre (01:42.756)
That's I think that's what we call a champagne problem,
Tim (01:47.106)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Emre (01:50.862)
All right, so with all of that being said, I would like to start the show by saying hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Team Check-In. And with me today, we have the founder of OKR Quickstart, a man who has helped over 70 CEOs implement OKRs effectively in their organizations and a man...
who has bulked up to such huge sizes that he's having trouble fitting into all of his shirts these days. Tim, welcome to the show.
Tim (02:25.506)
Now you've just drawn the attention to my type button here. Thanks for having me, Amara. I'm super pumped to be here today. This is very exciting.
Emre (02:34.362)
Yeah. It's good to have you on the show. And today we are discussing the role the role executives have to play in making OKRs work in their organizations. And I think that's really critical because more often than not, whenever we're talking about any form of goal setting, be that OKRs or just KPIs or any targets whatsoever, I feel like the heaviest burden is either on the people executing
and the people in middle management or just overall managerial roles. But that's kind of strange because when we're looking at OKR as a framework, it's as strategic as it gets. So executives should have a bigger part to play in it.
Tim (03:23.68)
Absolutely. think this is something that probably is where OKRs actually goes wrong quite often. It's almost a little bit somber here starting this podcast off on a of a low light here, but I think this is one of the biggest challenges. So often executives or teams think, right, we're just going to write some OKRs, just objectives and we've got our key results and we just write them and then that's it, we're done. And it's like, that is pretty much the easiest, the simplest part of it.
choosing the right problem to solve and being aware of where is our strategy going? What is that right problem to solve next? I think this is too where people get confused a lot about strategy. They think they see, you know, that strategy house, it's like foundations people, and then it's like integrity and all this other sort of stuff. And then like on top is success. It's like, that's not strategy guys. Like, come on. And you see it in so many companies, you know, or maybe they even go a little bit further and it's like customer focus. It's like, that is not a strategy that they are. They are just sort of principles, maybe even guidelines, but
If a really strong, if a strategy is really effective, the executive team has looked at where is the organization going? What does the strategic market look like and where does the competitive space sort of lie? And what are the steps that we're going to take and to sort of exploit those opportunities? And that is where you go from a direction from strategy perspective to a diagnosis to here's the problem we need to solve right now and converting that into an okay. Every okay. I should be solving a problem. I think that's where often it gets goes wrong.
Emre (04:49.596)
I like that. Every OKR should be solving their problem. And I do believe something you pointed out is there seems to be a lot of confusion around company values versus competencies versus goals and targets. Like you said, integrity is not a goal, right? It's something fully different. So is this the biggest misconception you've seen around OKRs in your opinion? The whole...
Tim (05:08.941)
Hmm.
Exactly.
Emre (05:17.884)
Set and forget mindset
Tim (05:21.388)
I think that is that is probably the major one, right? So it's understanding what is an OKR, you know, and often again, this comes back to that choosing the right problem. Often it's just a laundry list of stuff and quite literally the it's an objective, right? Statement of what we want to achieve. It's inspiring, it's exciting to read a little bit like a newspaper headline. That's my tip to teams when they're starting out, write it like a newspaper headline. You know, this we've achieved this great outcome. And then the key results are the measures of progress. And the really key part there is people think that's just your to-do list.
And it's, it's not, you want to have clear metrics. So number one, choosing the right problem to solve number two, your key results need to be metrics. And number three, that's where it is all about getting that focus on it. And the way we do that is by having a regular cadence around it. So certainly not set and forget, right? Which again is probably the default. And often that's when I get a call is it's like, we set our AKRs six months ago and we've not gotten any with them. Can you come and sort it out for us? And it's like,
you sort of miss the boat here, you know, like we're kind of rescuing the situation right now. So yeah, massively, you need to be checking in on them weekly. In fact, the way I frame it is weekly should feel barely enough, right? If this is your most important priority, like this is meant to be the top of the top thing we need to achieve. If you're only talking about that once a week, early enough, but again, we can't be talking about it every minute. So we'll settle for that. And that's where you need to be tracking your goals, at least weekly.
There are some teams with those exceptions. You know, if you're in a product team or a software team and you've got sprints that go for two weeks, catching up about them once every two weeks is okay. but yeah, certainly not less than that.
Emre (06:56.38)
I fully get that. We will definitely get into the cadence that needs to be set on OKR check-ins, retros, and all of that good stuff. And I feel a little strange asking you this one because it's kind of like getting Albert Einstein on your show and saying, so hey, what's an atom? What's the most basic thing? But as you said, many of the largest
Tim (07:01.835)
Mmm.
Emre (07:24.796)
problems in OKR implementations or even like scaling OKRs or turning that strategy and actually executing and getting results. One of the largest problems usually is getting it wrong from the start, having a false approach to it, not having a proper definition of what it is and what it is not. Now, I think everyone can tell, like, the acronym is objectives, key, results, short. But Tim, what is an OKR?
Tim (07:37.902)
Hmm.
Tim (07:50.382)
Hmm.
Emre (07:54.192)
NOT.
Tim (07:55.63)
Ah, it's a very good question. So I like to frame this in two parts, because most people can understand this. You have two parts to your day job, right? You've got your just sort of keeping the lights on, you come in, you check your emails, it's operational stuff that never kind of ends. And that's what we call business as usual, right? So it's that sort of stuff that is always going to be there. You know, again, checking your emails in the morning, you're not going to set an OKR about that.
you know, if you have a call center answering the phones, you're going to have an okay. R to answer the phones. Right. That's just what you're there to do. So that's where I sort of put in a bucket of what we call health metrics. You can measure those things with health metrics. So as an example, it could be, we talk about fitness. We'll sort of talking about that earlier with fitness. I just want to check that my house is in a healthy state. Right. And I'm just going to check my heart rate and go, is it within this good range? I'm assuming it is.
happy days, you the doctor is going to check on me and all those sort of things. It actually doesn't tell you whether I'm actively getting fitter at that moment. Like sure, once I'm really fit, maybe it'll be faster. But if you look at my heart rate, you're not going to go, oh, he's right now getting fitter, but you go, he's not dead. You know, the heart's still ticking over. I don't have a sort of, you know, a bad rhythm to it. Uh, that's my medical term, by the way, a bad heart rhythm. Uh, you know, you, you're, you're in a good state. So that's what your health metrics are. And so as long as we're within a healthy bound, we're good. Now, okay. Our is not for that. That's just.
You have normal metrics where you just make sure that we're between these two points. We're looking good. you know, for me, if my heart rate sitting between 50 and 60 beats, it's probably pretty good. If it's higher, probably should have a good reason. Maybe I've been for a jog or something. If I'm lying there, I wake up in the morning and my heart rate's going 160. That's bad. We need to do something about that. So, okay. R is definitely not in that sort of territory. The other part of work work that people tend to do is about driving change. And again, some teams
That's virtually all they do and other teams, they don't do much of that at all. So again, if I go to a call center, you know, my job every day, I'm answering phones. I'm not trying to change how the organization works. There might be a little part of my day, like 10 % or even less, maybe 2 % where I'm going and learning about how to be more effective at handling my calls. But ultimately, my work is around sort of just keeping the lights on answering those calls. But if we look at one of your product teams, right? The teams that's building TeamFlex, for example,
Tim (10:16.366)
pretty much 100%, maybe not quite, but somewhere between 80 and 100 % of their time is improving the product. They're driving change. They're thinking about, okay, a customer has this particular problem. Let's try and solve that. How do we know that we've solved it? How do we measure that? Maybe at a certain point in the application, people drop off because they go, this is too hard. So, okay, that's a problem worth solving. How do we know that we've improved it? Well, people complete whatever step that might be. We've made the product better.
And so if you're driving change, that's where OKR is. So it's used for a tool for driving change, but it's definitely not for just sort of keeping an eye on health. And it's also not a tool for tracking all your different priorities. Because again, if you have lots of priorities, you don't have a priority, right? You should have one thing that you're focusing on. So OKR is not a laundry list. And this is where I'd always encourage you only have one OKR to focus on that one most important problem for your team to solve. So you got that really dialed in focus.
Emre (11:11.792)
Perfect. And I think I just have the tagline for this episode now. OKR is not a laundry list. I like that. think that flows perfectly. Well, that's what we're here for. Shock and awe. Now, taking things from the more operational day-to-day business as usual side of it, now but towards the boardroom. How should OKRs actually show up?
Tim (11:17.442)
Yeah, you might surprise a few people.
Tim (11:26.008)
Chokano.
Tim (11:33.038)
Hmm.
Emre (11:39.31)
in the boardroom, the lives of executives? Are they a reporting tool, a decision-making tool, or are they something else entirely?
Tim (11:48.622)
I've got some really great stories before we get to the boardroom. I might just talk briefly about the sort of role of executives in this and then maybe we can go, okay, and how does that play out with board? So one of my, one of my favorite stories and a really great company I got to work with and probably something that most of your listeners have heard of is Domino's. So Domino's is sort of in, in the world is split into two key businesses. You've got Domino's in the USA and then you kind of got Domino's everywhere else. It's called Domino's DPE. So
We were working with the other organization, the whole world one, not the U S one. And they were to be honest, about to throw okay. Ours out. were dead sick of it. That had enough. They were at a point where they'd gone, look, you know, we're not doing this anymore. And when we came in, there was sort of a of a hail, hail Mary moments. Like if, if these guys can't help us sort it out, yeah, we're done with it.
And again, coming into that sort of journey, it's like, great. we've really got our work cut out for us at this point, because again, people hated it. They want to go on and I'm like, okay, let's see what we can do. Now. The first thing I observed was they had seven. Okay. Now the role of executive is to help really be looking at where the organization is going, understanding the key risks and therefore those key problems to be solving and getting the teams working towards that, whether you run okay. That's really high level, you know, delegated authority from the board to go and make these things happen.
Now with seven OKRs each with, I don't recall exactly how many, but it'd somewhere between sort of four to five key results. That's a heck of a lot. You know, we're sort of getting up into the 30, 40, maybe even 50 if we had a lot of key results, I'd have to go back and look at it. But that's a lot of data points to be looking at. And granted, it's a 40,000 person business. It's not a small beast, but there is a heck of a lot of work that happens and they're OKRs. They'll trying to set them up. And this is back to that point.
made a moment ago, which is what are okay hours not. They'll try to set them up as a sort of view of all the different priorities in the business, even though some were really critical and some were not so critical. Now, through working with them, we basically helped them whittle their okay hours down to one. And that role of the executive say, right, this is about driving success and focus. And it was in that quarter, it might have been the quarter after that. But basically, once we got it down to one, they had 30, 33 % sales growth in that single quarter alone.
Tim (14:09.714)
And that was a game changing moment, right? All of a sudden you could say, well, the power behind something like this and having this sort of focus. So the executive team to create that, they had to create focus. They also had to set it up so that the team was able to stretch themselves and fail. So one of the things you'll often hear about when it comes to OKRs is you're trying to achieve 70 % of your goals. The reason being is that if you have to hit a hundred percent of your goals, you're going to make them easy to achieve. You sandbag them. So
What we want to do is actually let's have a bit of stretch in here. And you know, sometimes we're going to nail it and sometimes we're to fall short. And that was really successful for Domino's. And this was a bit of a pattern than we saw other organizations. So one of our customers called Intellios, they're based in the States. They're a medical association. They basically do certification for people who do medical imaging is the ultra short version of that. They're an amazing company. The CEO is incredible because he's been really thinking a lot around what is the role of certification.
in the 21st century. And they've really been reimagining what that looks like so that there's better patient outcomes. Because again, if they do a great job at certifying people and making sure that their members are fully educated on how to do medical imaging, you get such better outcomes for the patients, right? And imaging is such a critical thing. Anyone who's been touched by any sort of illness that involves inside the body, right? Cancers or anything like that, you know just how important it is. And again, when you're pregnant, same thing. You're going to go through these sort of things. So it's just such a critical thing.
And what the Dale who is, who was then and still is the CEO had a vision for the organization. And so he had to take the whole organization on this journey. Cause you're going from a very traditional business to one that is now needing to wanting to innovate. Right. At that time, they weren't needing to with AI. think it's now becoming more of a thing where it is more of a need in this day and age, but they've been going through this journey. they're well and truly primed for it.
So the first challenge for them was getting the organization on board on the journey and helping their team members engage with it. But you're dealing with a board that's very traditional, right? We're talking about medical practitioners, imaging specialists, all these sort of things where you don't shoot for the stars, you know, in that sort of environment, right? You're not going to shoot for the stars and do some sort of, you know, out there medical procedures or anything like that. This stuff's all very well documented, very structured. Don't shake the boat too much. Let's just keep it going.
Tim (16:29.95)
And so Dale did a wonderful job of engaging the board to help connect them with his, his, the strategic challenge we have as an organization and where we need to go. And to get there, we're going to have to have some really strong wins, but some safe failures, right? Again, medical imaging here and certification, you you kind of have a bunch of people out there with sub-par certification. So, you know, they still had to make sure that they're doing the job to the top degree, but allowing them to try new things out, run some experiments within the organization that are very safe.
And that is one of the sort of game-changing things I've seen. So that board went from being quite a traditional board to one now that, you know, I've even seen them where we got a bit of feedback. The teams that were starting to, they basically, the COO does a really great report and he shares with, know, what's sort of happening. And some of those, okay, our schools were creeping up, you know, sort of went from 70 to 80 to some of them were getting into the nineties a bit too consistently. And so the board's kind of going, hang on what you guys are starting to overachieve here a little bit. What's going on. And.
before this, I'd never heard a board have that sort of conversation. Like, hang on, you're over-achieving, what's going on? And so it just shows the cultural shift. And I think like, coming back to your original question, which was the role of the board, the board is looking at risk and there is such a big risk behind doing nothing. And so when we talk in those sorts of terms to the board and get them comfortable with really as an organization, challenging ourselves, giving them full visibility,
Emre (17:31.964)
you
Tim (17:55.246)
all of sudden they're ready for the journey. But there's one other part that you need to nail as well. And that's making sure that they're comfortable in looking at where the organization is going and providing inputs into the OKR setting because they have to set the direction for the organization as well. Again, it's delegated authority to the executive team. The board needs to have a sense of where do we think the business is going. Of course, they're going to take a heck of a lot of input from the executive team and the executive team, their role is to define strategy typically. However, the board needs to be able look at that and go, okay, how does this fit into
where we're going, where do we think they need to move? You know, lot of these are industry experts as well. And in most boards, you'll find that. So they've got a lot of data points and a lot of different insights. So they connect those sorts of data points to the organization. So that's the second part. Having them number one, being comfortable with a journey like OKR where you're starting to innovate more. And again, you cannot innovate with certainty, right? That's the thing. If you want to have innovation, there's got to be uncertainty that comes with it. So you have a board that goes on a cultural journey, but then also have them part of that planning because quite often
Most of I'd say a lot of executive teams, their board is quite passive, you know, it's kind of like a, I'll come and look at the, at the pack, you know, the board pack, and I'll ask a bunch of questions. I probably won't look at the pack in advance, you know, I kind of keep the executive team on their toes. And they don't really do much until we'll hang on the sales are going sideways here on that's not quite going in the right direction. And then they'll start coming down. So it's sort of, you know, bored by passive attention until something's going wrong. And by that point, it's too late.
Emre (19:25.318)
So in all of that, I think we have two very key stories and two very key takeaways. One of them is about achieving buy-in from the board, and the other one is about executing OKRs and making sure you don't overextend yourself. And I want to just pick away at these one by one. And although I would love to focus on the Domino's example first, I think
Tim (19:44.589)
Hmm.
Tim (19:48.216)
Let's do it.
Emre (19:54.07)
One thing you said really stuck with me and that is you cannot innovate without risk. You can't innovate without there being some level of uncertainty. So when you are trying to get buy-in from the boardroom for the OKRs to implement OKRs organization-wide or in the case of Domino's, stick with OKRs. How do you balance that level of uncertainty?
Tim (20:00.578)
Mm-hmm.
Tim (20:18.243)
Hmm.
Emre (20:23.492)
with, you know, this is what we will be taking away. How do you make that pitch?
Tim (20:27.064)
Yeah. It's, remarkable. And this is a little bit embarrassing to be honest. think more often than not, there is such a lack of structure that number one, okay. Ours has a great track record, right? It was started back in the sixties. It's not brand new. it was something that caused Intel to base Motorola in the chip wars. was then what sort of forged Google and countless other Silicon Valley based organizations. Now it's just gone wildfire from there. So there's such a great body of evidence that
this framework and the way of thinking works. And so many organizations just don't have a structured like this that supports it. So often there's quite a wide door ready. If we start talking about doing something like this, there's a general level of openness where you really need to bring the board on the journey. And again, that shift around being open to risk taking those sort of things. That's a bit of a longer term play. I don't start there. kind of start with
This is around helping us have focus and it means saying no to a lot of things that we otherwise would be distracting us. Now for the board, that also means they've got to be open to not, and some boards have much more, especially where you've got founder led boards where the founder may have exited the business, but they're still very involved in the board. They often have touch points with teams and sometimes you get these board projects, special board projects that pop up because people are going direct. They've to be willing to let that go.
But the real pitch for them is it's about giving the organization focus and including them in the strategic execution in the front end rather than the rear view mirror, which so often is the case for boards. Yes, there's business cases and these kinds of things that often boards will want to see and have part of an approval process for. That's topic for another conversation. I think we can go way too deep into that. A quick headline, that is I don't think they're great, but you know, if that's your thing, that's your thing.
So if we're going through these kinds of processes and structures, knowing that they can actually be involved upfront and also increase the likelihood of success for the work that's happening. So a lot of traditional boards, have these programs of work and again, back to that business case, they're to say, right, you've got X million dollars to go do this thing. And, you know, the executive team is usually championed it. They've got approval from the board. go make it happen. The success rate of those type of projects is embarrassingly low.
Tim (22:47.864)
So typically boards and where they're part of other board organizations, they know that the success rate of most projects is pretty underwhelming. And it's almost a of a sort of frivolous attempt at growth, but they know it's not really going to go anywhere. So when you give them a structure that shortens those feedback loops, so a big thing again, coming back to the OKR and having those metrics, you got to move those early in the quarter. It's not good enough to work on something for a whole quarter and drop it at the end and hope that it moves the needle. You've got to be doing things nice and early to...
run experiments again, sticking to the product example here. Uh, probably can't get into a team flex feature that you guys aren't working on. I know if we can give away any sort of a hot costs on, on this podcast, but let's imagine you've got some great new AI feature and we're going, well, okay. Yeah. We want to build this feature in, but yeah, is it worth all the effort in the first place? And often you'll have a lot of conviction, but it's like, people really want this. You might say, right. You know, we know what this AI is going to do. It's going to solve this particular problem.
Emre (23:28.092)
You
Tim (23:46.186)
And we're going to add a button in to see if people are even interested at all. Right. And so that might be the focus of the quarter is just solving that problem. But the start of the quarter, you implement a button. That's probably going to take an hour of an engineer's time. Not even if you're to hook it up. So you're actually able to track it and things like that, but now very quick and then sit, wait, see if people click on it. And if they do great, that's a demand signal. Right. You can then start to see maybe not the key. Okay. Which would be people actually using that feature. That's not, going to move or the key key result.
but you might have a click-through rate and that already you start to see that number moving. Okay, people are clicking on it. Great. And again, you don't have to show this to all your users. It might just be a subset of the users. So that's where you get something out and then you go, okay, what's the next part of that problem that we can solve that would be meaningful value, right? And so maybe this AI is going to do 50 different things. We think in this quarter, we can get 10 of those happening. Let's just start with one. And so you build that in again, people click on it. They use the feature. Do they come back and use it again? Maybe it's reuse.
So you start to see the numbers move through the quarter. And by the end of the quarter, you've got that product built. It's been dialed in and the board or the executive team at any point can see, okay, the numbers are actually moving. It's not that we're working, we're working, we're working. It's dropped and invariably it's not successful. You're able to see, you know, we're working, it's dropped. It's not successful. We've dropped again. it's starting to work. Okay. It's getting better, better, better by the end of the quarter. Awesome. We've achieved the outcome.
So that's the big game change of the boards visibility.
Emre (25:14.076)
That's
Yeah, that's wonderful. And I think the way you're putting this is it's both, it's implementing the strategy and throughout the implementation process, you have all these little moments and all these checkpoints where you're actually proving the concept. So as you're putting this new practice or new product out there, this new thing in front of the board or in front of the world, in each of these little increments and each
of these little points, you're proving the reason for its existence. But you're also, I think, giving yourself an out. You're saying, like, if at any point you're giving yourself a maybe there will be a reason to pull out of this project, pull out of this initiative, we will find out as we're doing it. So instead of just retroactively doing something and then going, we messed up there. that one didn't pan out, did it? You're putting all these marks.
Tim (26:02.337)
Exactly.
Tim (26:10.764)
Yeah. Yeah.
Emre (26:14.766)
inside the process, which is, I think, incredibly valuable. Now, another question I wanted to ask is, because I don't want the pizza to get a bit too cold on this, but.
Tim (26:26.656)
you
Emre (26:29.628)
The change from seven to a single OKR, think on paper it sounds like, OK, we made this change and the results showed themselves. So I wouldn't look the results were out there, but I want to look at the why a little bit. So were too many OKRs putting too much strain on the employees, too much strain on the business, and they weren't like hitting those growth targets or was it stressing out the employees?
What was the detracting effect of having too many OKRs? And how did consolidating them actually prove helpful? And also, how do you go from seven to one? Of course, without divulging any, like, I don't want to ask for dominoes' objectives and key results on air. But how do you go about condensing seven objectives into one? That's a loaded question.
Tim (27:23.01)
Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a very, it's a great question. So, I am, I am bound by NDA. So I can give some high level direction though, right? Which, which might help people paint bit of a picture. so where we really started was the, the seven OKRs were across the entire business, across all the sort of key strategic priorities that they had. Now the thing with those seven OKRs, they were all critical to some
And certainly each of the executives saw them as critical as well. However, the question was, were they all critical for the entire organization to really get behind? And as we started to look at some of these OKRs, we went, okay, there's certain OKRs that around sort of, you know, certain parts of the business. You know, we'll be very careful, say here, but certain things that we do that, yeah, that really important, but actually as an executive team, we don't care that much and we trust the team that's doing them. And that's kind of like an isolated team. And so they can just, you know,
That's actually a problem for them to solve. They can go work on that OKR. We don't need to stress about that. Then there was others, and I can pull some of these threads, I think, comfortably enough. There were others which were around the customer experience. How do we really create a great customer experience? How do we get our pizzas delivered quickly, safely, right? Like, that's not going to be a surprise. They want to sell. They want to get you pizzas quickly and in a safe manner, right? That's kind of like what every pizza company does.
But like, okay, how can we actually do that better? And so they really start to unpack the customer experience around that. But that's where they got down to it. Just a single OKR that looked at how do we really create a great experience for our customers and just really double down on that, but also get in front of our customers. So that's around sort of marketing messaging. So customers would be aware of what's going on. And that's where they really create that great OKR. I think that's some as well that were around margin. And we said, you know what? All of this is going to have to hit a certain rate of margin.
It's they're not donating pizzas to the entire world at this stage. You they are a business and you know, they still want to do it at really high value for money. So they, they came up with a margin that was actually a health metric. They took that out of the OKRs for that time period. And this can, this is where something actually worth people noting things can come back. Right? So if they, let's say they weren't actually think it was, it was great because they've always worked for value for money, but let's say they wanted to change the margin, either make it fatter or make it thinner. Right.
Tim (29:44.374)
What they could do is say, actually that's now an okay. After this quarter. they'll bring it out of the health metrics, put it in as an okay. Let's change the margin to where we want it to be. And then once that's done, great. Off it goes back into the health metrics off the table for the okay. anyway, that's where coming back to the seven down to the one, it was really that absolutely aggressive focus on where do we as an organization need to pay attention and where is it going to take the most collaboration alignment from the entire business for us to work in lockstep.
to deliver that outcome. Cause again, there was a lot of things where, know, it's like that team's got it. They're clever, they're smart people, let them go do that thing. We don't need to worry about that. And if there was curiosity, which often there was, the exec team can get updates. They can go in and see how the team's progressing, just looking in, they were using an OKR tool, go look at that. Or they can just bubble it up and have them come and present to the executive team. There's always room for that. But in terms of what the exec team is tracking, narrow on those OKRs or that OKR, sorry.
Emre (30:44.188)
That's amazing. I think this is a great segue to, I think, talking about points of intervention, right? Because, I mean, to use a sports metaphor over here, over like on my side of the world, in Europe, Europe and Turkey and all of that, we have club presidents who are very active in
How you know a football club or a basketball club is actually performing it is not uncommon for? The president of a club to go into a locker room and cuss players out very famously a Greek basketball team panathinaikos I think their president Canceled their flight tickets and made them take the bus all the way from another country back to Greece because you know They didn't perform so we have you know these executive levels
Tim (31:23.875)
Hmm.
Emre (31:41.052)
people actually going in, intervening when targets aren't being met, to use that sports metaphor. How should executives intervene when a key result is clearly going amiss? Or should they intervene? Or should they let it flow and see what happens? What are those points of intervention?
Tim (32:07.192)
Severe punishment, canceling flights. That's the way to do it. No, look, yeah, that's it. You plenty of time to think about what they've done, right? That's the idea. No, so look, I find in the vast majority of cases that the individual is an author team isn't the one at fault here. So there can be an upstream issue, which is the team hasn't gone through the proper training or hasn't gone through the proper support. There's a lot of those kinds of things.
Emre (32:09.084)
Let them think about it on the way back.
Tim (32:36.998)
you as a leadership team in your organization made some wrong highs. You know, again, that does point back to the individual there, but it's because you made a mistake upstream. but typically I find it's not really the individual's fault. It's going to be some sort of mistake that's happened along the way that's caused this to happen. Now that's one part of the picture. The other part is when you're trying to innovate and do new things, as we've already talked about sometimes in fact,
failure is absolutely a part of that. And you've got to relish in the failure because that's where the learning happens, right? But if you're failing every single key result all the time, something's wrong at that point, right? So it's that balance of making sure that we're having some success and wins. So in terms of where the executive team has a role play, setting the teams up for success, number one is critical. And that is all these upstream moments. If we sort of go away from the obvious, know, again, doing the hiring the right people, making sure they're trained, making sure they've got all the tools they need, making sure that
They've got time to focus on change. That's another big one. I keep coming across. need our team to be working on these projects, but you know, they've got no frigging time to actually be getting any work done because they're doing this other operational task. let's say all the conditions are right. The first step where I see things go wrong. And this is where the leadership team need to come in and help. Once it starts going off track is not setting strategic context. So many leaders don't set the strategic context. And by that, I mean exactly what we're talking about at the start.
It's that strategic diagnosis and giving the team contextual awareness of how do they fit into solving that problem? They might be solving the entire problem. They might need to be working with other teams to solve that problem, but you need to create that clarity so that they know who they're working with, what they're trying to solve and why. And then they can create a really great OKR around that. Once they're working on their OKR as a leader. And again, this doesn't matter whether you're an executive or a senior leader.
Generally as in the C-suite, I still like to go down and see what's happening in the teams, looking in their OKRs and then actually go in meeting with individuals just as a matter of course, not when things are just going wrong, but that's my style. If that's not for you, then I don't know, probably look at your leadership style. You should be going and being part of the teams and seeing what's going on. But anyway, if things are going wrong, I'm going to see in the reports that, this team's going a little bit off track. That's going to be a signal to me that they probably need some help.
Emre (34:43.26)
Thank
Tim (34:55.658)
Now that's not a negative thing. That is a chance for us to come in and support. So that's where coaching as a capability for leaders, a lot of the Silicon Valley companies get this, you know, they're really tight on this. If you look at this sort of leadership pillars for Apple and Google and these sort of organizations, coaching is absolutely fundamental. I think a lot of businesses don't get that. And that's where this goes quite wrong because when a team member, well, when a team is having issues, it's always, it's often about blaming the team.
rather than actually going, okay, how do we actually solve this? What resources do they need to be successful? And, you know, are they thinking about this problem the right way? That's probably the other biggest one. You know, as a leader, you're often put into that position because of your incredible problem solving ability. You don't want to come down and solve the problem for them because that's just disempowering for the team, but you want to help them go on that journey to understand what are their blind spots, what problems are they not seeing and how can they go ahead and solve that? So that's where as a role of a leader.
Keep aware of what's happening in your teams, track where things are and aren't going wrong. Again, if using a tool like TeamFlect, that's a great way to do it. Little plug there. We need to get a snippet on that one. But go in and then go and help them.
Emre (36:02.756)
I mean, normally I push these, normally I make these awkward transitions where I go like, and if you're, like you're taking care of it for me, which is wonderful. Amazing. I think it's incredible how often this comes up where we were talking to on another episode of the show.
Tim (36:14.264)
That's it. Now this segue from our sponsor.
Yeah.
Emre (36:31.418)
the inventor of the cedar feedback model, Anna Wildman, another one of my favorite acronyms in business. We have so many of those, Jesus. But in terms of feedback in the workplace, especially feedback coming from above, she was focusing on, there are so many models out there, so many ways to structure feedback, but it's always the one thing it should rely on is it's not, why couldn't you climb this mountain or what you did wrong climbing this mountain, but it's...
Tim (36:37.646)
Yeah. Yeah.
Emre (37:00.848)
you and me against the mountain. Whatever it is, we're on the same team. And this mountain is not just yours. This OKR is not. It doesn't just belong to the marketing team. It doesn't just belong to this junior something associate. It's all of ours, especially if I'm an executive, if I'm a leader. So this is ours. How do we tackle it together? And I think that attitude plays a huge role.
Tim (37:03.043)
Hmm.
Tim (37:16.91)
Mm.
Emre (37:25.838)
In terms of achieving this strategic context that you were talking about, do you think cascading or like a waterfall structure, is that a good way to do it where you have these company objectives cascading down to team and departmental and then the individuals?
Tim (37:43.618)
Yeah. It's so it's interesting. I think this is probably one of the more contentious topics. And I have seen where it's really successful and where it really goes wrong. The cascade is without fail, the biggest mistake I see people make. What we want is alignment. And this is why the, the, the executive team giving strategic context is so important. I think one of the examples, this might even be sort of one of the people who made this framework very popular, John Doher. He's got his book and example. And it's kind of like you got the
CEO is okay, it's not the executive teams, okay, the CEO came up with their own. And then they have two key results. And I think the example is something around the lines, we're gonna butcher this. yeah, anyway, sure, people can leave comments about this. Basically, one was around filling the stands and another one was around how successful I think it was like a rugby team, but you know, how successful the rugby team were, and the head coach how successful that was, that would, you know, that would basically get that key result. And that would become their objective. And then for the head of marketing,
that would be about filling the stands. Now, there's a very big, obvious flaw in that. All of a sudden we have two misaligned incentives between these two executives effectively. So what do mean by that? Well, let's say, you know, someone hires, you know, brings in a player who's a really polarizing character that has a really bad history. We don't need to go into what that history is, but you know, they're like someone like one of the worst of the worst people on the planet.
right? And people almost universally despise them. It's not one of those polarizing characters where some will love them. Some will hate them. It's like everyone hates this person. Right? So all of sudden now this, this head of marketing has got the job to fill the stance when you've got an absolutely despised player that might be against all the clubs, sort of a community rules and values and all those sorts of things. Now this person's job has gotten much harder versus if they had that as a shared, okay, that would be a discussion as a team. Like, do we want to hire this person?
and have this negative impact. Are we comfortable with that? Are we comfortable with that from an ethics perspective? And that's where that cascade model, it doesn't really work logically. Where it really falls apart though is all of a sudden you start doing this in a large organization. It's a very slow and burdensome process. If you want to hear the sort of horror show of traditional goal setting, there's something called the balance score card. And like many of these things, it's still out there. It creeps around in the dark. And if you're not careful, you'll join an organization or getcha.
Tim (40:03.086)
It's this thing is basically you've got all these metrics and then you are delegating metrics down to the next layer. And then that team has to go through and they do it through this like calibration process. And that thing gets pushed down to the next team and so on and so forth. You do it once a year and it's an absolute nightmare because it is so complicated. It really the evidence shows it does not deliver any value whatsoever, but it is such a painful process. You can only do it once. So the difference with okay. We want to have it done as a quick lightweight.
process we want teams to able to quickly align. And that's where we have exactly that it's this alignment. So some people call it aligning some people call it laddering up, but effectively the executive team sets their OKR and the executives go and talk to their team say, right, here's how you fit into this context. And they set an OKR which aligns to that and so on and so forth. So there is a question on how big your organization is. You might want to skip that middle layer. Some organizations go into the top.
And then at the bottom, we're to do it. Those two layers, other organizations do it at each layer. And that's a whole topic of a podcast in itself. And it very much depends on the organization, but the ultimate end state there is the teams are aligning through strategic context rather than through all chart. And the biggest benefit there is that starts to break a lot of the negative things that come with organization charts, like solos and things like that. Cause teams can connect and work together across the organization. Super important to get that.
Emre (41:29.432)
Amazing. And I think you cleared up a lot of ground around these methodologies that are widely accepted. And I've talked to people about cascading structures on end. But I think I've always looked at it from a very sunshine and rainbows approach. But like you said, it's very easy to see goals separately, even if they're connected on this little hierarchical chart.
Tim (41:35.533)
Hmm.
Tim (41:58.03)
Hmm.
Emre (41:58.256)
But it's very easy to see them separately from each other. I think even if you're going to have that structure, it's so incredibly important to make sure those align with each other, like the sports example you gave. So in achieving this, and we're rounding up to the end now, we have some tools. There are some tools such as check-ins, retros, and pit stops that people can implement to make sure we're on target, we're doing it right.
Tim (42:09.219)
Hmm.
Emre (42:27.386)
What's the best way to approach those?
Tim (42:31.63)
It's a really good question. So, you got time for time for my plug. I've actually got a whole bunch of resources. People can go and see and learn about all this sort of stuff. So if they go to, our quick start, quick start slash podcasts, they'll be able to come across it there or podcasts. They'll be able to find it there. and they can go download all their own material and then check out our other stuff. got like a YouTube channel and we've got, we've got our own podcast called strategy candy. It's good fun. so we talk a lot about that sort of stuff there, but if I give the sort of ultra short version,
What we're trying to do is we're trying to get everyone to be collaborating and working together. And so there's almost a of like a bouncing ball you want to follow to make that happen. one of our, which I had my cheat sheet handy, have a cheat sheet that people can get and kind of talks about, here's the rhythm. But basically nice and early in a quarter, we want to start talking about the problems that we want to solve in the quarter ahead. And so that's where you have a bit of conversation. We are right now pretty much midway through the current quarter. I don't know when the podcast, everyone else will get this, but right now in the recording time we're midway through.
All of our customers are now thinking a lot about what does the next quarter look like choosing those strategic problems to solve. Now they do that by also bubbling up insights from the team. So there's this sort of conversation. So this is not like a thing that you can say, we do this one session. We do do a thing called a mid cycle, which I'm going to wrap up with, where we talk about a little bit, but it's not like a sort of set structure here. It's the conversation starts now. We then,
get together as an executive team and reset the OKR. So for most of them, every quarter we go through and do a bit of a total rewrite. And we look at what's the problems for the quarter ahead, do a reset on that. That is then shared with teams for feedback and alignment. And the teams look at that and they give genuine feedback. And I've had plenty of times where a team members looks at a metric and gone that we can't do that for some reason, or that's not the right thing to be doing, or that metric doesn't make sense. And they're also given that problem to solve as well. So the teams have that context. They go and set their OKRs. Now,
That is some organizations they call it strategy to action week. Some call it just literally okay hour week, but it's basically a week where they set aside time to go and do their okay hour setting. It's not a week of solid okay hour setting, but it's time where, you know, we try and minimize meetings, minimize distractions. If we need to connect with other teams to align on goals we can. And at the end of that week, we do something called a playback. And this actually comes from defense. There's a book by Joko Willink. And I believe it's something around the lines of
Tim (44:54.888)
on leadership strategy tactics or something like that. That's not quite right, but I'm sure if people Google it, they'll find the right one. And he talks about lots of examples where, and in fact, there's another book called Team of Teams, there's similar principle talked about in there, where if you want in the army, if you want your Navy SEALs to be successful, as an experienced general, you can tell them exactly what to do. You could probably give up an 100 % perfect plan on what to do.
But because you're telling them what to do, they're only going to take in about 40 to 50 % of that plan. And when they go and execute it, it's going to be a disaster. So what you're better off doing is you give them the problem to solve, them the mission, let them come up with a plan. They share the plan with you and you then use your experience to say, okay, have you thought about this? What happened if there's someone around that door? All these kinds of things, you can help them round that plan out, probably up to a good 80 or 90 % of what you would have come up with yourself, but it's going to be executed to perfection because they own it.
And so that's something called a back briefing. What we created was something called the playback, which is the same version, but for okay. As we basically, depending on scale, the organization, but you can still do that. Get through quite a lot in a short amount of time. go through all the goals of the different teams and the amount of visibility this creates. This is like something unheard of for a lot of organizations, really high visibility so that we all know who's working on what. And it creates this great sense of, well, like there is magic going on in this organization and none of that. I don't really know what's going on. Or I heard this department's doing this thing. Like it is all.
out in the open crystal clear. So that's now from there, we can kick off the quarter, right? And some organizations, they do like a big brouhaha, there's pizzas and stuff like that. I wonder who could be doing pizzas. Wonder which customer that would be. Anyway, but they do this thing at the start of the quarter. It's all great fun, great fanfare and often running. Midway through the quarter, we do something called the mid cycle. Now this is something where it actually came a little bit inspired by a lot of things that different organizations do. This wasn't intentional, but it
looks a little bit like what Pixar do. They call it the brains trust. And it's basically a forum of peers that will look at a movie they're producing and they will go through and they'll critique it and they'll give feedback and all these kinds of things. The mid cycle is designed to be doing that. It's checking in on your progress and your peers get together and we do something called a pit stop where you can go into breakout rooms and they will help workshop, help you solve the OKRs problems that you've got or how to really accelerate your OKRs.
Tim (47:13.998)
So that's another support mechanism that we have thrown into the mix. And as I was saying earlier, we also do a bit of a kind of what's coming up next. Finally, come the end of the quarter, not every company does this, but there's a bit of magic in this one. This is what Intellios does. They hold a retrospective. So they go through all as a company, all the lessons learned, what made us successful this quarter, what was harder than it should have been, what should we do differently next time? And they do a kudos activity. So it's basically a thank you, they'll give each other thank you notes. There's a of a randomized award system where...
If you get a thank you, your name might get pulled out of a hat. And then you kind of do this reveal game that we have and you might get, you know, might be some Amazon gift cards. could be a Australian potato that we send over to you. We don't actually send the potatoes, but anyway, but you know, some of them are dud prizes, but that sort of variability makes it really exciting. But yeah, that's kind of in a nutshell, the whole sort of the structure. One thing I skipped there was like the cadence that goes through it. And that's the weekly check-ins that's happening every week. It's part of an executive committee.
I could go into that, but again, that's probably one. Go check out our resources if you want to see the agenda and the structure for something like that.
Emre (48:15.824)
Yeah, and I have to say this, if you weren't convinced that Tim over here is a master of putting so much useful information and takeaway in these easily digestible, wonderful formats, if you weren't convinced of that before, the answer to this last question should have convinced you. And do yourself a favor, Google OKR, quick start and go into their website. Because in an era of AI generated SEO slop,
where everyone is just pumping out best practices guides left and right, Tim is actually putting out helpful, personally written, and great editorial quality resources, both on their actual website and on their YouTube channel. And they have all the resources you need to actually succeed with OKR. So do yourself a favor. Go and Google OKR Quickstart.
Quick start and find Tim and connect with him on LinkedIn. We will be putting links down in the description below. And if you're listening to us on iTunes, Spotify, where we found podcasts, leave us a like, subscribe. It really helps you out. And if you want to try the highest rated OKR software in the Microsoft Teams app store for absolutely free, you can always click the link in the description. This has been the team check in. Tim, thank you so much for coming and lending us your wisdom. Bye bye, everyone.
Tim (49:41.346)
Amazing, Am right? Bye bye everyone.
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