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What are OKR focus objectives? How can you use OKR focus goals to implement an OKR system?
Choosing your OKR focus objectives allows you to decide on your priorities and frame your goals. OKR focus objectives also give you the tools to adjust your goals.
Read more about OKR focus objectives and how they works.
Why Focus Objectives
How to Implement OKRs for focus: Create OKRs at the organizational level, the departmental level, the team level, and the individual level. At each tier, create no more than 5 sets of objectives and key results. Limiting the number of OKRs keeps you focused on what matters most.
This OKR superpower has two facets: 1) focus on your priorities, and 2) commit to the OKR process. We’ll look at “focus” first.
There are 3 steps to creating OKRs that focus your attention
- Identify your objectives
- Identify your key results
- Check the quantity and quality of your OKRs
Identify Your Focus Objectives
The first step of the OKR process is figuring out the “Os,” your objectives. Every individual and team in the company will have their own objectives and key results, but in order for these OKRs to be meaningful, they need to align with the organization’s highest objectives, so start with these.
To determine your organization’s highest objectives, ask, “What are the most important tasks we need to accomplish in the next three months, the next six months, and the next year?”
You can’t do everything. Answering these questions gets you focused on the few things that have to get done for the company to succeed. These are your objectives.
Your biggest priorities, the goals that everyone in the organization is working toward, are your organization-level objectives, or company-wide objectives.
Once you’ve identified your organization-level objectives, departments, teams, and individuals can identify their own objectives. These objectives often feed into and support organization-level objectives, so determining them is a matter of starting with the top objectives and figuring out what sub-goals you need to meet to achieve them. (We’ll cover how to create this alignment in the next chapter.)
At each tier, OKR focus on three to five objectives. Any more than this, and your focus will be too dispersed.
Identify Key Results
After you know your priorities, your objectives, you can start to plan how to achieve them. Key results are the steps that get you there. For each objective, decide on three to five key results—sub-goals that are specific, measurable, and time-bound, and that collectively ensure you’ll attain your objective.
The three sets of key results (KRs) below are all proposed paths toward the objective of winning the Indy 500. What differentiates the strong key results from the weak and so-so key results?
| Weak KRs | So-So KRs | Strong KRs |
| Objective: Win the Indy 500.KR #1: Achieve a faster lap speed.KR #2: Decrease time during pit stops. | Objective: Win the Indy 500.KR #1: Achieve a lap speed that’s 2% faster.KR #2: Decrease time during pit stops by an average of 1 second/stop. | Objective: Win the Indy 500.KR #1: Achieve a lap speed that’s 2% faster.KR #2: Decrease time during pit stops by an average of 1 second/stop.KR #3: Decrease pit stop errors by half.KR #4: Spend 1 hour/day practicing pit stops. |
The Problem with the Weak KRs: These key results are measurable, but they aren’t specific. How much faster does your lap speed need to be to win the Indy 500? By how much time do you need to decrease pit-stop length?
The Problem with the So-So KRs: These key results are better because they’re measurable and specific. In the beginning, many of your KRs will look like these, and that’s fine. But there’s still a problem. Achieving a faster lap speed is relatively straightforward, but how do you decrease your pit-stop time? The strongest KRs answer how.
Checklist: Focus and Commit
Once you’ve focused your priorities with OKR focus, you need to commit to the OKR process. Use this checklist to set up the OKR system and get your entire staff to commit to it.
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- How Google uses OKRs to rally 100,000 employees in the right direction
- How to avoid setting useless OKRs, and how to set great ones
- Key subtle behaviors your team must master to make OKRs work
