OKR Best Practices: No-BS Strategies for Success
It’s an uncomfortable truth: many Objectives and Key Results implementations fail spectacularly.
After training over 2,000 OKR coaches across 300+ organizations globally, I've seen the same chronic issues sink even well-intentioned goal-setting efforts: too many (often unfocused) objectives, overly activity-focused key results, and "rules for thee, not for me" approaches where senior leadership treats OKRs as for everyone else, but not the C-suite.
What You'll Learn
This guide shares the battle-tested best practices from the No-BS OKRs approach to Objectives and Key Results—a more efficient, coherent, and results-focused approach that addresses the chronic issues plaguing traditional OKR implementations. You'll discover the specific strategies that separate high-performing organizations from those struggling with OKR overhead and confusion.
The Reality Check: Why So Many OKRs Fail
Before diving into solutions, let's examine what's actually happening in most organizations that try to implement OKRs. Standard DIY OKR implementations often suffer from predictable problems that turn a methodology meant to create focus into a messy, time-intensive bureaucratic nightmare.
The most common failure patterns include creating enormous volumes of objectives and key results (I've seen key result lists numbering in the double digits for a single objective), focusing on activities rather than measurable outcomes, and treating OKRs as something to "bolt on" rather than integrate meaningfully with existing work.
Perhaps most damaging is the "learned helplessness" dynamic where some leaders rely heavily on OKR coaches and core teams to lead the OKR rhythm (and even write OKRs for them) while simultaneously holding their teams accountable to a methodology they don't personally practice.
Core Best Practice #1: Ruthlessly Limit Volume
Keep it to 3-5 objectives maximum, with 2-4 key results each.
One of the biggest misconceptions about OKRs is that they need to capture everything important happening in your organization. This thinking leads to the "laundry list" trap where teams create objectives for run-the-business activities that don't actually need improvement.
Here's the critical distinction: OKRs are designed for areas where you need to grow, transform, innovate, or improve—not for steady-state maintenance work. Your payroll processing, regular customer support, and milestone deliveries don't need OKRs when completion is success. They only call for a key result if it’s important to improve the performance of one of those functions.
Practical Application: Before creating a key result, ask yourself: "Are we trying to change, improve, or innovate in this area, or are we just trying to maintain what's already working?" If it's maintenance, use your existing delivery planning systems instead.
Want to see how No-BS OKRs fit into a coherent Connected Strategic Stack?
This No-BS Connected Strategy Guide shows you what “good” looks like. Download examples of finished Connected Strategic Stacks — including best practice No-BS OKRs — and get instant clarity on your next strategic step. Includes a quick self-assessment to pinpoint your organization’s biggest OKR opportunities.
Core Best Practice #2: Focus on Outcomes, Not Activities
Key results should measure the change you want to create, not the work you plan to do.
This might be the hardest shift for most teams to make. Traditional planning focuses heavily on what we're going to do by when. But circumstances change, and sometimes teams complete everything they plan, while still failing to achieve what they need in terms of outcomes.
When teams focus on activity-based key results, they often find themselves very busy with no clear sense of whether they're making meaningful progress. They may miss growth opportunities that present themselves because they're too focused on completing their predetermined task list: a long list of cognitive biases keep us persisting toward completing activities we plan — whether or not they’re yielding progress or measurable results.
The Fix: When developing key results, "What change might be incredible to achieve?" rather than "What will we do?" If you can't identify a measurable outcome that matters, you may be looking at a delivery milestone rather than a key result.
Core Best Practice #3: Create a Safe-to-Learn Environment
Expect to be “in the red” (but with progress made) on about one-third of your key results.
In healthy OKR environments, not achieving your key results is a feature, not a bug.
It's one of the most important aspects of the methodology: setting ambitious goals, working hard toward them, falling short, and then asking the critical questions about what worked, what obstacles emerged, and what you can learn for next time.
When teams adjust their targets mid-cycle to make their numbers “look better,” they miss the opportunity to discuss what went wrong and what they could do differently. This "moving goalposts" behavior undermines the entire learning value of OKRs.
The Mindset Shift: Stop trying to make your numbers “look good” and start using them to help you uncover the actual truth. If all your key results are landing in the green, you're missing opportunities to stretch and improve.
Core Best Practice #4: Leaders Must Model OKR Behaviors
In a healthy OKR implementation, senior leadership writes their own OKRs and participates fully in the methodology.
The fastest way to create an OKR implementation that leads to attrition of high performers is to create a "rules for thee, not for me" dynamic where leadership mandates OKR creation without participating themselves. When leaders lag on OKR creation and internal coaches "help" by writing goals for them, it creates learned helplessness and undermines the entire system. (It’s also obvious to everyone involved except the senior leaders: this dynamic can actually undermine respect for leadership because of the “do as I say, not as I do” dynamic that can frustrate high-potential high-performers).
Leaders who are responsible for articulating vision and strategy must also be responsible for the labor of creating and implementing OKRs: Objectives and Key Results are how vision and strategy link to behavior and daily choices… and that’s a leadership responsibility. The OKR core team operates in an internal expert capacity, not a “doer” capacity.
Implementation Strategy: Design OKR rhythms so that leaders can drive and own them. When there's a blank where a manager's goals should be, senior leadership should ask that manager directly: "Why don't you have goals in the sheet?" rather than looking to the OKR team for answers.
Advanced Best Practice: Design for Leading Indicators
Include measurable progress signals, not just outcome metrics.
Most teams can identify important outcome goals but struggle to quantify progress empirically during the quarter. When asked "How will you know you're either on track or at risk on your critical outcomes?" the answer is too often a lengthy silence followed by a shrug or an optimistic, vague, subjective update — not a data-informed, objective answer.
Leading indicators are your early opportunity and warning signals. They help you make course corrections before it's too late and provide objective data for decision-making rather than relying on subjective assessments.
Getting Started: For each outcome-focused key result, ask "What measurable progress signals would indicate we're moving in the right direction?" Even imperfect measurement is better than subjective gut feelings when making strategic decisions.
The Implementation Reality Check
Remember that OKRs are an experiment. Even if you take ten minutes to write down objectives and key results without following any rules or structure, you may have significantly more clarity than what you have without OKRs. There's no "perfect" or “right” OKR—there's just getting started and iterating based on what you learn.
Start with a month or quarter experiment, then review what worked and what didn't. The goal isn't perfection; it's continuous improvement in how you align your team's efforts with your most important outcomes.
Your Next Steps
How can you get started?
Choose one area where your team needs to improve, grow, or innovate (not maintain or merely deliver).
Create one objective that clearly states what's most important to achieve and why it matters.
Identify 2-3 key results that would objectively demonstrate progress toward that objective.
Keep it simple, keep it focused, and resist the urge to capture everything. The power of OKRs lies not in volume, but in their ability to create focus, clarity, and alignment around what matters most.
Want to see how No-BS OKRs fit into a coherent Connected Strategic Stack?
This No-BS Connected Strategy Guide shows you what “good” looks like. Download examples of finished Connected Strategic Stacks — including best practice No-BS OKRs — and get instant clarity on your next strategic step. Includes a quick self-assessment to pinpoint your organization’s biggest OKR opportunities.
Meet Sara Lobkovich, OKR Coach for people whose identity, cognitive style, or values puts them at odds with mainstream business culture.
Learn more about Sara here, and how she works with clients like you to move strategy out of decks and docs and into new practices designed to enable you to learn your way to strategic achievement.
