OKRs Examples

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Personal Development OKRS

OKRs for Personal Development

Stop wasting your OKRs. Focus on the right work and accomplish your goals.

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Why use OKRs for personal development?

Personal OKRs are a bit of an anti-pattern, but they can still be helpful if you keep them separate from the company and team goals.

Why?

Well, company OKRs shouldn't cascade down to individuals as it often leads to confusion. Goals that are set at a team level will clearly focus on business outcomes. But goals that are set for individuals will often be a mix of business outcomes and personal growth targets that don't necessarily align with the needs of the team.

For instance, a developer who wants to move into marketing will have a certain number of objectives that are unrelated to their current team. This would lead to a personal OKR plan that has 3/4 of the goals connected to dev work, and 1/4 of the goals talking about marketing skills.

You could split the plan in 2 different set of OKRs, but it's much simpler to avoid cascading team OKRs down to people.

But while you shouldn't mix personal objectives with team OKRs, you can still use the OKRs structure to track your personal development goals:

  1. The OKRs format is a great way to express your goals in a simple and measurable way.
  2. Tracking progress on your Key Results every week will keep you accountable and help you adjust your efforts.
  3. Re-using the terms of the OKR framework will also simplify communication by setting a standard for writing and updating goals.

Just treat these personal OKRs as something completely separate, that should only be read by you and perhaps your manager.

Examples of OKRs for personal growth

Key questions:

Are we happy with general safety and security protocols?

Are requests handled in a timely manner?

Are employees generally happy with their work environment?

Do we need to review the IT budget?

Examples of OKRs for personal development

You'll find below some OKRs examples to take inspiration from.

Personal OKR to get better at public speaking

Objective

Increase confidence and competence in public speaking

Key result

Give 10 public speeches in front of an audience

Key result

Complete 6h of training sessions on public speaking

Key result

Score 7/10 or above in feedback sessions

Personal OKR to improve leadership skills

Objective

Become a more effective leaders

Key result

Complete 4h of training on communication and collaboration skills

Key result

Delegate 20% of current responsibilities to the team

Key result

Get better at running 1:1s with the team

Personal OKR to improve your writing skills

Objective

Get better at writing blog posts

Key result

Create and publish 6 blog posts with a minimum of 500 words each

Key result

Receive at least 10 positive comments on posts

Key result

Increase the average time spent on each blog by 20%

OKRs to become better at running

Objective

Improve long distance running performance

Key result

Increase endurance by running 4 times per week

Key result

Increase speed by completing interval training sessions twice per week

Key result

Improve 5k race time by 20%

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Tracking your OKRs

Knowing how to write good OKRs is critical, but without good tracking in place, the OKRs will fade away and focus will be lost.

The easier it is for a team to have weekly discussions around the OKRs, the better they'll execute. Here are a few best practices for tracking OKRs.

OKRs-tracking with Tability

1. Do weekly check-ins

Quarterly OKRs should be tracked every week to be effective. Without a continuous reflection on progress, your OKRs won't be much different from having KPIs.

The check-ins process can be automated with a platform like Tability that takes care of reminders, and distribute updates to the teams.

2. Keep track of your confidence

Good progress updates should help everyone understand how far we are from our goal, but also how confident we are in achieving it. You can use a simple red/yellow/green color coding to indicate your confidence.

3. Make trends easy to see

Lastly, it's important to look at trends to avoid false positives. It's not rare for a team to have a hot start and then slow down mid quarter. This will be hard to see unless you can look at progress trends for individual Key Results.

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