Executive OKRs Set the Ceiling for the Organization

One of the first red flags that we are looking at is the quality of executive OKRs. We look at the leadership OKRs that the leadership team has set, and if we see that those are of poor quality, maybe the objectives are rather generic, make your customers happy, build great products, be a great team, increase revenue, then it's really hard for the teams below that to get any information and a lot of value out of that. Then we look at goal achievement across the organization as well. That's a second red flag. Often enough people completely overestimate what they can get done and what they can achieve in a quarter. We have the data on it and very often in the first couple of quarters teams achieve an average of 33 to 40% of their key results. Yes, everyone has learned OKRs should be stretch goals and OKRs should be ambitious, but if you're only achieving 20, 25, 30%, then your OKRs become honestly a wishlist and the whole thing becomes extremely frustrating.