Balancing Strategy and Team Autonomy in Setting OKRs

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Hey folks, 

It’s weird how the instant the calendar flips to September the temperature drops (a bit). It’s still not cold but it’s nice to feel a bit of relief from the summer heat. Lots going on this fall. Take a look.  

Just launched our series of monthly, free OKR webinars. We had nearly 400 folks sign up for our first webinar on OKR basics. Next month, we're tackling AI and OKRs. AI’s not going anywhere, and now’s as good of a time as any to learn how it can affect (and help) your OKR goals. 

In this newsletter, I’m diving into balancing strategy and team autonomy, plus some exciting global workshops coming your way. Oh, and there's a special referral offer that'll give you access to my exclusive tutorial on customer centricity. 

Let’s get to it. 

- Jeff

P.S. For one week only, I'm offering a power-packed OKR bundle that'll transform your approach to organizational success. Grab my book, "Who Does What by How Much?" and the comprehensive video training, "Everything You Need to Know to Get Started with OKRs," for just $49!

Article: How to balance strategy and team autonomy with OKRs

If I had to guess (and I am going to), I'd say that most job descriptions at most companies promise some level of autonomy. Guessing further, I'd say that most companies follow through on those promises up to a point. In my experience, that point happens in two different scenarios. The first scenario is when a team's autonomous decisions begin to directly conflict with the executive stakeholder's vision and direction. The other is when the company isn't doing well. Leaders tend to reign in control and increase the amount of prescriptions and directives.

Is there a balance between the team's desire to figure things out on their own and the leadership team's needs to exert some kind of control and transparency? The answer is yes, and it starts with how your company sets goals.

Align the organization with a clear strategic direction

Grounding your teams in a shared strategic direction aligns the entire organization. Everyone has a clear sense of what they're targeting and why it's important to the company. As a leader, these are the first set of guardrails you put in place. Any work the team chooses to do has to be justified through the lens of the company's current strategy. Teams are free to work as their expertise and experience motivates them as long as their work falls within this initial direction. At the very least, this provides an initial decision-making criterion for whether or not an idea is to be pursued at all. This holds true for both the teams as well as the individual leaders. Once ideas are deemed to be "on strategy," we can further objectively refine our decision-making by understanding what the current measures of success are for achieving the strategy.

Setting explicit strategic goals provides objectivity

Strategic direction is good. Strategic direction with specific goals is even better. This is where Objectives and Key Results can help (OKRs). Your strategic goals can quite easily be transformed into the current objectives for the company. Based on that, you can set measurable outcomes as your key results. If we achieve our strategic goals, what will our customers be doing differently? How much behavior change do we need to see to know that we can move on to the next strategic goal? In others, who does what by how much?

Measurable key results make it easier and more objective to measure how well the team's chosen direction is working and whether a course correction is in order. Is the work moving our customers to change the behaviors in the ways we've committed to? If it is, terrific. We keep going in that direction. But, if it isn't, we now have the evidence to justify a course correction. That course correction can come from the teams themselves based on their learnings executing the work. It can also come from leadership based on their experience and broader view of the entire organization. In both cases, the proposed change needs to be explained through both the lenses of strategy and the OKRs.

"Our latest effort has been [X]. As we've been delivering parts of it to market, we've noticed that it isn't having the impact we hoped it would. We've learned that customers might prefer [Y] and are proposing we shift to this direction. We expect [Y] to have [this impact] on our agreed-upon key results."

This is a far more effective conversation than a team demanding to do what it wants or an executive simply dictating a set of features for the team to build. Both (or many) parties get to discuss the work and progress objectively through strategic and measurable lenses. While the decision to pivot to a new idea may still be subjective to some extent, it also comes with success criteria in the form of existing, new, or adjusted key results.

How does this help in times of crisis?

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned times of crisis as a point where team autonomy often gets "taken away." Executives want to feel like they're in control of the troubled situation and begin to dictate the solutions they believe will right the ship. This is also when teams can become their most creative. With an aligned strategy and OKRs that reflect where the company would like to go, despite the crisis, executives can still prescribe work to teams but instead of telling them exactly what to build, they can direct them to solve for very tactical customer behaviors. These behaviors are often the leading indicators of the strategic OKRs. Leaders may be better suited to understand which levers they need to pull right now. However, it's the teams who can most quickly determine how to get those ideas into market quickly since they are closest to the work and the customer. This balance of top-down direction and team autonomy meets the needs of both parties with the winner being the customer and then the company.

Giving teams what they need to make the business successful

You hired people because they're smart and capable of doing good work. They took a job with you because they want to grow and have a positive impact on the company and their career. Autonomy is a basic requirement for all of this to happen. Autonomy without guardrails, however, is chaos. It's no wonder leaders resist it. Provide the guardrails to your teams with strategic direction and clear OKRs. Then, give them the autonomy they're looking for within those constraints. Creativity thrives in the constraints.

What I’ve been up to

Our series of monthly, free OKR webinars is in full swing. This time, we're diving into "Winning at AI with OKRs" We'll explore how to use OKRs to guide AI implementation, ensuring we're not just slapping AI onto products for the sake of it. 

We'll cover how to add real value with AI, use it in ways that truly benefit customers, and leverage OKRs to shape AI into a powerful tool for enhancing user experience. Join us to learn how to keep people at the heart of your AI strategy.

What’s new on the blog

Why adding revenue numbers makes prioritization more effective (and how to do it) - Adding revenue numbers to your product stories can fuel where and what you prioritize. I know teams often get nervous about financial projections, but trust me—including these "money stories" can make your plans more compelling and help everyone decide what to tackle next. 

[VIDEO] How to visualize any transformation story - I just dropped a new video on how to visualize transformation stories. It's a quick guide to help you craft a compelling narrative for any big organizational change you're planning—whether it's implementing OKRs, going agile, or rolling out new policies.