The OKRs Field Book

A Step-by-Step Guide for Objectives and Key Results Coaches

Ben Lamorte

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119816430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Take your OKRs coaching skills to the next level with this practical handbook.

In The OKRs Field Book: A Step-by-Step Guide for Objectives and Key Results Coaches, Ben Lamorte, a seasoned coach and management science expert, provides a structured approach for implementing objectives and key results. This book provides tips and tools that enable you to coach your OKRs clients with confidence. Lamorte analyzes foundational questions that must be answered prior to deploying OKRs and the roles required to sustain an OKRs program.

Packed with excerpts from actual OKRs coaching sessions, this step-by-step guide shines a light on the OKRs coaching process. You learn how to help your client refine key results that look like tasks into key results that reflect measurable outcomes. In addition to sample training workshop agendas and coaching emails, Lamorte introduces the first comprehensive list of OKRs coaching questions. The field book covers how to:

• Structure an OKRs coaching engagement using a three-phased approach.
• Avoid common pitfalls such as cascading OKRs based on the org chart.
• Ensure your client asks the right questions at each step of the OKRs cycle.

Perfect for external coaches and business mentors looking for a repeatable structure to help their clients succeed with OKRs, The OKRs Field Book is also an indispensable resource for internal coaches looking to support their organization's OKRs program.

CHAPTER 1
What Is OKRs Coaching? Why Is It So Important Now?

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By the end of this chapter, you will be able to …

• Describe why OKRs coaching demand is on the rise in the 2020s.
• Define OKRs coaching.
• Apply a reflection exercise to improve your OKRs coaching skills.

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THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I learned in graduate school was not part of the engineering curriculum. It was something I learned from Dennis Matthies, a lecturer in the 1990s at Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning. As part of his Accelerated Learning course, Matthies explained that prior to embracing a new skill, you should reflect on why you've chosen to take on the challenge in the first place. He presented data and shared examples to back this up. It seems obvious to me now; learning is accelerated when we can clearly explain why we're putting in the time to develop new skills. So, building off Dennis's teachings, let's explore why now is the right time to develop OKRs coaching skills.

This chapter begins with a brief recap of the history of OKRs. It describes how OKRs coaching demand emerged in the 2010s and started growing exponentially in 2018 into a mainstream business practice across the globe. After presenting the definition of OKRs coaching, the chapter ends with excerpts from actual coaching sessions to make the definition more concrete. The goal of this first chapter is for you to clearly state why OKRs coaching is important right now and why you have chosen to develop your coaching skills.

CURRENT STATE OF OKRs AND WHY NOW iS THE TIME TO DEVELOP OKRs COACHING SKILLS

As context for the current state of OKRs, let's go back to where it all started. In the late 1970s, Andy Grove introduced OKRs as an evolution of Management by Objectives (MBOs). Grove was then the CEO of Intel. As key executives left the company, they spread the word on OKRs to emerging big players such as Oracle in the 1980s and Google in the 1990s. By 2010, dozens of tech companies in Silicon Valley were using OKRs as a system for defining and achieving their most important goals.¹ So, if OKRs had been around for nearly 50 years, why the sudden interest in OKRs in 2013? Short answer: Google.

In early 2013, Google Ventures partner Rick Klau shared a video on how Google was using OKRs.² The video was wildly popular. Its impact led to the first spike of interest in OKRs outside the Silicon Valley and, indeed, outside the tech world.

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@klau tweet: "My OKRs video just passed 150,000 views. That's about 149k more than I thought it'd get."

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In 2014, when the CEO of Sears viewed Klau's video, he immediately rolled out OKRs across the entire organization. Sears Holding Company is not a tech company by anyone's definition. The introduction of OKRs at Sears exemplified its expanding popularity and is just one of many examples of the growth of OKRs across business sectors.

With the popularity of OKRs gaining traction, business leaders and management consultants from all over the world began approaching OKRs coaches for both coaching and support. In 2016, Christina Wodtke published Radical Focus, the first book dedicated to the topic of OKRs. Later, in 2016, the book Objectives and Key Results, by Niven and Lamorte, introduced the steps for deploying OKRs. This book offered case studies from organizations around the world, as the interest in OKRs was growing outside the United States. Both Radical Focus and Objectives and Key Results became essential reading for anyone interested in OKRs, and both were translated into several languages.

In 2017, I made multiple trips to China, where I partnered with Beisen, a leading HR software company based in Beijing. I delivered a series of OKRs training workshops in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen to certify 200 business leaders. During one of these trips to China, I was lucky enough to spend a couple days with executives at Huawei, one of China's leading technology companies. At Huawei, I met Kuang Yang, an OKRs expert who not only translated the OKRs book I coauthored, but also went on to write the first book dedicated to OKRs written in Chinese.³ Kuang explained that the impact of Huawei's success with OKRs in China was comparable to the impact of Google's success with OKRs on tech companies in the United States.

By the end of 2017, OKRs were taking off across the globe. In addition to collaborating with organizations in China, I had clients based in Singapore, Australia, Poland, South Africa, France, Germany, Israel, India, Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Canada. However, even in 2017 the demand for OKRs coaching was still nascent. In early 2018, I had roughly one call per week with a different company exploring OKRs. I continued to allocate a portion of my time to marketing efforts such as speaking on OKRs and posting content to The OKRs Blog on OKRs.com. But then 2018 happened.

The interest in OKRs started to grow exponentially after John Doerr's book on OKRs, Measure What Matters, hit the market in April of 2018. The stories in Doerr's book featured big names like Bono and Bill Gates. With a growing interest in OKRs came an increased demand for OKRs coaching. I shifted my focus exclusively to deliver OKRs coaching to my clients. I finally had the problem I always wanted: too many leads...