3 Quarterly Rocks
Your team needs focus, but the larger organization struggles with setting measurable goals. Instead of OKRs, find your 'big rocks'
Context
As a department, your impacts are taking too long, and things that should be finished and launched in a month or two are dragging out over multiple quarters. Your team needs focus, but the larger organization struggles with setting measurable goals. Perhaps the executives had bad experiences with OKRs, or the HR team has misused the OKR framework and created competition with individual goals. Or you are going through mergers and the leadership team is avoiding accountability.
Discussion
I've always driven for specific, measurable goals and then been baffled when executives weren't interested in this. Over my career I've come to realize that there are a number of situations where execs prefer to keep their options open even over setting specific goals. One product exec told me, "We need to keep some wiggle room" when we were working on setting annual goals.
The highest-performing organization I worked with (growing from 30 people to a successful IPO) used a book by Verne Harnish called "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits" to guide how we operated. His newer book is called Scaling Up, and we discussed it already in the Strategy Foraging play.
Verne Harnish