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Objectives and key results, otherwise known as OKRs, are part of the management philosophy of setting objectives and measuring their key results that has swept through the tech industry. Legendary VC John Doerr famously introduced OKRs to Google in the early 2000s, basing his system on one he learned from Andy Grove at Intel in the ’70s.
Doerr writes: “Measuring what matters begins with the question: What is most important for the next three (or six or 12) months? Successful organizations focus on the handful of initiatives that can make a real difference, deferring less urgent ones. Their leaders commit to those choices in word and deed.”
But this prominent management trend isn’t just something to leave at the office. OKRs, applied to your own career, are a terrific way to establish and demonstrate your value. As a sweet side benefit, OKRs also make it easy to structure and write your résumé throughout your entire career. Here’s how you should use OKRs in your personal career management.
Objectives
Start by asking:
What is the most important thing for you to do in the next three (or 12) months?
What are your main priorities for the next year?
Where should you concentrate your efforts?
Like everybody else, you’ve only got 365 days in a year. How you choose to spend it shapes what your career will become. What, specifically, are your goals? To learn new software, to increase the number of clients you land, to improve the quality of your reports, to hire another 40 people?
Whatever your goals, your career does better by stating them, out loud and in writing. Goals give people targets to shoot for. Without a target, you might spread yourself too thin, do a little bit of everything and accomplish nothing.
Establishing goals helps you to focus your time, attention and calendar. Instead of pushing on 100 doors a little bit, push on just two or three for a bigger impact on your career. It’s especially helpful if you establish these goals with your boss. That way, you have buy-in from your company that you’re focusing on the right activities.
Key results
The second component of OKRs is a key result, which measures how well you’re achieving your goal. Numbers are important because they are an objective measure of success. Without them, you can’t assess your capability in the world, your need to improve or understand where you are falling short. Setting a specific number helps frame your activities in a way that provides clarity on your progress.
Using numbers to measure how well you’re getting ahead in your career is obvious for success in business. Setting OKRs for yourself doesn’t just help improve your performance in the current year; it also helps communicate your value at compensation reviews and promotion time.
Tracking success
OKRs make it easier to communicate with the boss and the company. When you’ve agreed with your boss on which goals are most important for your success, OKRs make annual reviews easier. They allow you to show the goals you’ve agreed on, and the specific numbers you achieved along the way. Keeping track of OKRs makes preparing for the annual review process a breeze. And demonstrating the results you’ve achieved justifies, with evidence, that bump in pay or new title you request.
OKRs also help when the time comes to move on. Pulling out a few years of old OKR annual reviews reminds you of your past successes. Crafting bullet points for your résumé is made simple by OKRs. You can show how you added value to your company, and by how much.
It’s so effective because it’s so easy, and communicates your value so clearly. As Big Tech has found, OKRs are the best way to propel organizations into the stratosphere of business success. As you’ll find, they’re also a compelling way to organize your work effort, bringing clarity and focus to your goals.