Avoiding Common Pitfalls in OKRs

If you say you do OKRs, but you're still setting them the old way, a manager's coming to their team and says these are our OKRs, then have you achieved anything really? Probably really not. Most often we get to an organization, they already do OKRs, but nothing really shifted and therefore no improvement was seen. So, really the biggest pitfall is you don't involve the teams. Then the second pitfall is that organizations set and forget those goals. They set them and then they just don't look at them anymore. Yeah, okay, you're doing OKRs, but they haven't influenced any of your behavior because you aren't really looking at them. OKRs are supposed to bring focus. What often happens is that instead of a very focused objective, organizations set an objective like, we are a great team, or we have happy customers, and that doesn't help you focus at all because, it is so broad that literally anything under the sun could fit under this objective, and so you have, again, gained nothing by this.