Sara Lobkovich | OKR Expert

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Are your goals for the new year on track?

Sara Lobkovich

Let’s go, February. Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash.

By this point in the year -- 1/3 of the way through Q1 -- many of us have already abandoned any New Years Resolutions we set -- and in our work lives, we may still be digging out from year-end, having missed a month of achievement toward our 2022 goals. We're not going to start with goal-setting today -- most of you have already done that step.

Instead, we're going to learn a bit more about the types of goals you've set already, and share a few simple steps to help you get your goal achievement plan on track.

I'll share a few words and meanings that are helpful for shared understanding when we're working with goals, and then share a step-by-step from Michael B. Stanier's book, "The Coaching Habit," which I find helpful for scaffolding the step we often miss: actually planning the behavior change necessary to achieve the goals we set.

Links to resources mentioned are below the player, and a full transcript follows!

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Episode 01 Links:

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to the Thinkydoers podcast. Thinkydoers are those of us drawn to deep work – where thinking IS working – and we don’t stop there. We’re compelled to move the work from insight to idea, through the messy middle, to find courage and confidence to put our thoughts into action.

I’m Sara Lobkovich, and I’m a thinkydoer. I’m here to help others find more satisfaction, less frustration – less friction, and more flow in our work.

My mission is to help changemakers like you transform our workplaces and world.

Let’s get started.

 

*** 

 

Today, we're going to get in under the wire on the close of the first month of 2022 to remind you that you've probably got an annual plan, or a big personal goal that you worked hard on at the end of the year, as you looked back on 2021. We're not going to talk about goal setting today -- instead, we're going to spend a few minutes noticing whether you've made progress on those goals you set. And if you haven't, don't worry -- that's actually really normal. I'm going to share a few simple tools that I find help people get started on the behavior change necessary to make progress on goals, since that's a step we often miss.

First, I am going to introduce myself since this is the first full episode I'm making here -- and I'm also going to share a little bit of language with you since I'll be throwing around a lot of words that need some shared meaning to be helpful.

 

***

You're going to hear me talk a lot about OKRs -- or Objectives and Key Results. I've been working deeply with OKRs since around 2019, when I was working with an agency and drew the lucky straw to build the agency's first curriculum around coaching OKRs for a large enterprise client.

Since then, I've

  1. trained nearly 2,000 OKR coaches in 300+ organizations worldwide

  2. facilitated hundreds of hours of OKR workshops to help teams set, align and achieve transformational goals.

OKRs are not a magic solve for all of your organization's problems -- they are a tool that requires skill, practice, courage, and experimentation and learning to leverage successfully. So you will hear me talk about OKRs as one of the tools in the toolkit, but they're only one of the tools.

For folks who aren't familiar with OKRs, I have an older blog post I really need to update but it gives a decent introduction, on saralobkovich.com.

For now though, I'm just going to share a quick intro to what those words mean when I use them here. There is a lot of buzz around OKRs, but not a lot of consistency, and even with four years of professional deep focus and practice, I'm iterating and learning. So these are the definitions we'll work with for now, and I reserve the right to update you with shifts in future episodes. 

OKR Objectives are clear, directional, inspiring statements of intent that describe the small number of big directions we aim to pursue together.

Key Results are the small number of most important and relevant objective measures of success, that help us know whether we’re achieving or progressing toward our OKR Objective. 

So -- in our OKRs, we don't talk about what we're doing -- what we're doing goes in our action plans or work plans. In the model I work with, anything that's measured in terms of percentage complete is an action or activity, and goes in our work plans.

Ultimately, our OKRs help us clarify what our big picture Objectives are, and how we'll measure our success, objectively.

***

There's one other concept I want to share with you before we dive in on those quick tips about why and how you and your organization may not yet be mobilizing around the big plans you had in mind before you took your holidays.

I'm going to talk about a couple of different layers of goals -- and this comes from sports psychology and coaching.

In the sports arena, often there's a lot of focus on "outcome goals," but this type of goal isn't limited to sports. They're the big, stretch goals -- usually infrequently measured, and often binary -- we either win, or we lose. And we may not control all the variables of whether we win or lose. Some examples:

  • Place in the top 5 in my age category in the Super G race

  • Write a bestselling book

  • Double our revenue in 2022

So remember that -- we're going to talk more about Outcome Goals later on.

Three are two OTHER types of goals that help us achieve those Outcome Goals. And these are performance goals, and process goals.

This is another place where different people use wildly different defintions, but I like to think of performance goals as the objectively measurable leading indicators that we're on the right track toward achieving our outcome goal. They may blend measures that we have more or less control of, but we typically have more ability to influence progress on them over time.

So if we're going to achieve that bestseller book outcome goal, supporting measures we might organize around are things like:

  • Pre-sell 10,000 copies of the book prior to launch

  • Podcast guest episode appearances achieving a total reach of 100,000 people similar to your target audience

  • Self-assess your energy score weekly to make sure you're maintaining a "healthy" energy score as you work on the book, so you can do your best work.

When I mentioned Key Results above: Our Key Results are often a mix of a few big outcome goals, and a number of performance goals to help make sure we're maximizing our progress.

Then Process Goals describe our "how." Our process goals ARE largely within our control --

They describe the changes in our processes and SOPs by which we're going to increase our likelihood of success on our outcome goal. They also may describe planned activity or milestones that you must hit to achieve your goal. For example, for our best selling author in development -- they may have process goals that are a mix of:

  1. Progress: Write one chapter per week

  2. Milestone: Complete rough draft of manuscript by March 1

  3. And actions: Build a plan for the book launch.

 

OK.

That's it.

Now we have shared definitions of a few key terms:

  • OKR Objectives

  • Key Results

  • I mentioned Activity or Work Plans and then

 

Now we know the difference between

  • Outcome goals

  • Performance goals, and

  • Process goals.

 

So that last bit brings us to the first thing to consider, if you're lagging on your motivation or ability to make progress on the goals you set. And this applies to people with individual or personal goals, and to organizations looking back at their strategic plans, not knowing where to begin or what to do next to maximize progress.

 

Pull out that annual plan or your goal, and now -- identify what it actually is, according to the language we just learned.

 

Odds are, unless you're a goal nerd like me, it's most likely full of:

  • Big, multiple-variable outcome goals that may be only partly within your direct control; and

  • Planned activities (often in the form of milestones or activity plans)

 

Let's talk about the first type first.

How many of those do you have?

 

If you have more than 3 or 5, then I'd encourage you to prioritize. For individuals, you can start with ONE -- and if you must tackle more than one, no more than three, please. If you're an organization, you're going to do well to focus in on 3-5 of those big outcome goals -- and we're going to call those our Objectives for now.

That doesn't mean the rest aren't important

It means that, for right now, you need to focus on a reasonable number of goals -- because when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

 

OK. So we've whittled down our outcome goals to a manageable number of Objectives. That's progress.

The next thing I WANT to do is coach you through forming some Key Results, in the form of performance goals. But that's an entire episode's worth of content and we're better off sticking to the schedule I haven't taught you yet

Where we set and locked our goals at the end of last year, so we're not going to even CONSIDER changing them until the end of Q1. Why?

Because if we change them during the quarter, we're going to miss out on learnings about what we could do better next quarter.

So instead of setting any new Key Results, let's just look at those Planned Activities -- or whatever milestones or activities you identified if you set any.

Those aren't Key Results unless they are objectively measurable. If they're a true objectively measurable target like:

  • Pre-sell 10,000 copies of the book prior to launch

Then you DO have yourself a Key Result, and you can identify it as such.

 

But odds are, if you're not a professional goal-setter, you may see that anything you've set that isn't an Objective is a process goal, or planned activity. So you can put those down as Process Goals, or Work Plans -- whichever works better for you.

So we've made progress. You started out with something you were calling a plan, or goals, or resolutions, or a strategy -- and now we've increased your likelihood of success JUST through a little vocabulary lesson -- since now you're a bit more aware of the characteristics of the goals you've set.

If you've only set Outcome Goals -- or Objectives -- then you may notice that your confidence and motivation to prepare may flag -- sometimes over-focusing on our Outcome Goals alone can lead to under or over-training and injury in sports, or apathy -- lack of engagement -- or burnout at work.

If you've only set Process Goals, or Work Plans, you may find yourself again -- struggling with motivation. What's the "why" when there's no bigger goal to ladder up to? I used to struggle with this BIG TIME between big climbing objectives -- when I had a Next Big Objective I was training for, I trained like it was my job. But the minute I went into "recovery" or "maintenance training" without a next big objective on the calendar, I'd lose all motivation to even get off the couch.

If you have a mix of Outcome goals and Process goals, you may be able to motivate to stick to your plan, and that activity may be enough to help you feel like you're making progress.

So keep at it.

What you may find when we get to the outcome date and take stock, though, is that you checked all the boxes on our process goals or work plan list

And then be surprised by your performance on your Objective.

Sometimes you'll surprise yourself in a good way: overshooting your Objective entirely. That sounds great -- and it may be if we're talking about a bestselling book -- but if we're talking about that Super G race, and your goal was to place in the top 5 and you smoked your entire age category and would have been competitive in the top 5 in "expert" then that's not really the most ideal outcome.

Sometimes you'll surprise yourself by underperforming. The book doesn't take off in its first week; you try hard in your super G but the weather is worse than you expected and you wind up struggling just to finish; your team did everything on their work plan and ultimately came in way below your revenue target.

These misses aren't a problem: setting an Objective is an experiment to see if we can achieve an exciting, uncertain outcome -- and we can influence the result, but we don't control all the variables.

But these misses do point to something we'll talk about in future episodes when we dive deep into Key Results

All of those are examples of "surprises" when we get to our final outcome measurement.

We'll talk about how this plays out in corporate environments in a future episode -- but

A hint: it happens OFTEN and is VERY EXPENSIVE.

I was reading a 2003 Harvard Business Review article the other day that quoted an executive describing annual planning as "We pretend to make strategy, and they pretend to follow it."

(and in many organizations, nothing's changed in the last 19 or so years)

Source: Real Value of Strategic Planning (hbr.org)

But for now, let's just know -- It's possible to increase our confidence and reduce the incidence of "surprises" at that stage by setting true Key Results -- so when we experience those sensations of leading by hope, or the other pitfalls mentioned above, we increase our motivation to learn about Key Results before we set goals for next quarter.

For now though -- we'll run this experiment this month without them -- and see what you learn!

***

OK. Last thing.

Now you've got your head wrapped around your Objective and/or some Work Plans.  

There's one more step I'm going to ask you to take, and that is to form an actual plan for behavior change. 

Right now, you may have established a habit around this goal. Maybe, you're sticking to your plan and checking off those process goals and doing what you think you need to, to achieve it.

But given that it's the end of January, we are perilously close to when most Americans give up on the goals they may have set at the new year.

A poll of 2,000 Americans found that it takes just 32 days for the average person to finally break their resolution(s) — but 68% report giving up their resolutions even sooner than that.

Source: NY Post

And if you're working with these goals in a corporate setting, then odds are, you haven't even gotten out from under your email after the holidays, much less started in on that big, audacious target that you may have the whole year to figure out how to achieve.

If you're in either of those camps, what you're ultimately running into is that

ultimately -- we have to change our behavior, to change our outcomes.

And changing our behavior: THAT'S not easy.

***

Authors Kegan & Lahey's book, Immunity to Change, shows that we struggle to make changes in our behavior EVEN WHEN it's a matter of life and death.

They cite a study showing that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don't change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully. The status quo is so potent, it's hard to overcome even when it's literally a matter of life or death. Those authors describe how our individual beliefs and our organizational mindset create a natural and powerful immunity to change.

And there are all sorts of areas where "set points" come into play in human behavior. There is a theory in health & wellness on weight, for example, that theorizes that each of us has a "set point" for weight -- a weight at which our individual body is "happy." According to that theory, if you lose weight, you may feel hungry until you get back to your set point weight.

Source: Harvard.edu article discussing the "set point" theory on weight

 

There is a "set point" theory around "happiness," as well -- that we each have a relatively stable level of happiness, largely determined by our genes and personality. This is why when people win the lottery, they may be temporarily happier -- but even winning the lottery doesn't confer a long-term life-changing happiness people assume it would.

An aside: there is some research indicating that mindfulness can shift our set point of happiness -- so there's one more reason to meditate.

 

It IS hard to change.

But it's not impossible.

 

Here's a resource to consider.

The Coaching Habit, by Michael B. Stanier is a great book, with lots of practical, easy to apply value, and a host of questions that can help leaders make the shift from listening defensively (which they may not even know they're doing) and doling out advice (which they may think is leading) to learn a question-based style of leadership that can reduce the calorie-burn of leading and managing, and increase ownership and solution-orientation among reports.

 

I love how simple and widely applicable the approach is. And one of the tools that book teaches is a "habit builder" that I've found super helpful.

We're often aware of the habit or behavior that we want to change.

But we're not always as aware of the triggers for that habit, so we just find ourselves in our habitual behavior -- sometimes, getting upset with our selves that we're doing exactly what we promised ourselves we wouldn't do.

So this habit builder is super helpful -- because it lets us identify:

  1. First, what's the trigger we're going to watch out for?

  2. Second, what's the old habit we're going to break? And

  3. Third, what's the new behavior we'll exhibit?

 

The trigger may be a location, a time, an emotional state, a person, some condition or operating reality. But when we identify a trigger, we can see it coming -- we can remind ourselves that when that thing happens, we're going to consciously choose our new behavior or habit.

So to give an example, in a personal goal-setting situation, a habit-change plan may be something like:

When I ignore my 9am timer and notice I'm still sitting on the sofa procrastinating instead of getting up to start my podcast research like I scheduled

Instead of abandoning my research plan for the day and postponing it to another day,

I will set a ten minute timer and when the timer goes off, I will get up and get immediately to work.

 

You can find more on this method at the Box of Crayons website:

The Coaching Habit | Introduction to Coaching Skills for Managers & Leaders | Box of Crayons

 

But that simple habit-builder is VERY helpful, because that level of trigger, old habit, new habit plan can literally fit on a sticky-note (no joke: that's usually where I put mine).

In a corporate setting, the structure is valuable as well -- it's a helpful step by step for helping teams brainstorm toward Key Results around changing established patterns or habits that at first may seem impossible to set Key Results for, but it just takes a little creativity.

The whole book is a great, fast, useful read -- and highly recommended if you're looking for a bit of structured help around both building a toolkit to coach your teams, and, to be your own best coach.

***

OK team…

 

That is WAY more than enough for one episode. Thank you for joining me and for hanging in there this long. I would LOVE to hear from you about what here resonated and where you got stuck or confused -- also, if there's anything you have questions about. You can find me @saralobkovich everywhere:

Social links: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | TikTok

I'm the only one there is -- and my email address is sara at thinkydoers dot com. I'd be thrilled to have you as an email subscriber -- for infrequent, more formal, just-business messages you can subscribe via redcurrantco.com, or I've got a more personal list that takes side trails into topics around well-being, mental and emotional health, my race team life and other serendipity at saralobkovich.com.

Thanks again -- now set a ten minute timer, give yourself a few minutes to chill, and then when the timer goes off – get up and write yourself ONE habit change plan and then email me. You don’t have to tell me what your habit change plan is, but if you send me an email or DM to let me know you did, I’ll invite you to a little side community for a some personal accountability support to help you achieve that habit change!