Understanding the connection between OKRs vs. Performance Management
The movie "Air" details the intricate relationships that led to Nike signing a young Michael Jordan to his first basketball sneaker contract, and the creation of "Air Jordans." As part of the negotiation, Jordan's mother pushed for -- and received -- a stipulation that the family would earn a percentage of sales for every sneaker sold. The movie ends with Nike CEO Phil Knight (played by Ben Affleck) pondering how many sales they might possibly generate, which Nike estimated to be $3 million in the first three years. The movie later revealed staggering sales of $126 million in year one for Nike, and Jordan winning Rookie of the Year and making the All-Star team on his way to becoming the greatest player of all time. Talk about crushing your goals! I bring this up because there are a lot of elements of "goal setting" at play here ... Nike as a company, Jordan as an individual, sales targets, CEOs, agents, customers, and other stakeholders. At Microsoft Viva Goals, we often get questions around the intersection of goals and performance management / personal development. After all, we're talking about goals, right? What's the difference between the goals we set as a department, and the goals I talk about with my manager at our 1:1? That led us to publish our point of view: Understanding the connection between OKRs vs. Performance Management Within the document you'll see we present 4 key pillars: OKRs are designed for collaborative, strategic goal setting for your business and teams. Performance Management is used to define individual priorities in support of the larger team effort. OKR output could be one of many inputs into an assessment of an individual’s performance, but it’s important that it’s not the only input. OKR output should generally not be directly tied to an individual employee’s compensation. If we apply these to our Nike story, CEO Phil Knight would have set company-wide OKRs for his entire organization. In addition to goals around their running sneakers and clothing, they might have had an aspirational objective of expanding their market share for the basketball division (people forget at the time, Nike was a distant third to Converse and Adidas), and a key result metric of exceeding $1 million in sales a year of Air Jordans. (Boy, would the percentage results in Viva Goals have been off the chart that year). For the use of this example, remember that Michael Jordan wasn't technically an employee of Nike. A better analogy might be Peter Moore, the designer of the shoe. While he might have had a team OKR around the launch of Air Jordans, his individual priorities would have been judged on a broader basis ... how did he contribute to his team, what was his individual impact, how well did he work with his peers, etc. If he was in his personal review, while the success of Nike selling $126 million in year one certainly would have been one of many inputs to his review, it shouldn't have been the only input. Here at Microsoft, we love aspirational goals. So whether yours is for your company to launch a $100 million brand, or a personal goal to become the greatest of all time at what you do, OKRs and Performance management can lead the way. To learn more, review our document: Understanding the connection between OKRs vs. Performance ManagementAlternatives to Viva Goals?
Viva Goals being retired wasn't good news. It put many of us in the community in a pretty tough spot. There is less than a year to find a new OKR software and migrate. We really liked Viva Goals because our team could use it inside Microsoft Teams. Some of the alternatives we are considering switching to are: Teamflect WorkBoard Perdoo All three of these have great Microsoft Teams integration and solid OKR features. We are also considering other alternatives such as Profit Co and Lattice. Any opinions on or experience with these tools?My favorite Viva Goals feature - multi alignment - and how I use it.
Hi everyone! I wanted to share my thoughts around a personal favorite feature of mine, multi-alignment in Viva Goals, and how we’ve been using it both internally at Microsoft and across some of the customers I work with. There are three primary use cases I’ve found for multi-alignment and I’m going to walk through each of those below. “Promoting” a key result to be aligned to the team and department level I was working with a team here at Microsoft and their leader was very much so a delegator. When it came to goal setting, they wanted to see what the team came up with first, and then provide input. So they had their team of 7 create goals for each of their representative organization and present those back to the leader. From there, the leader then picked out a handful of Key Results they wanted ‘promoted’ up to their level. What I really mean by ‘promoted’ is that they were multi-aligning the key results that were selected to be aligned to both levels of objectives. One key result object, but aligned to multiple levels of objectives. There was representation from each organization and the beauty of doing this in Viva Goals, was that there needed to be only one update on the key result, but it was viewable and contributing across multiple objectives. Saving time and keeping them aligned. Contributing to both an Objective and as a sub-KR Many times I run into or work with teams that want to manage their goals in two different ways. The first side of the house might be focused solely on the numbers. “Away with these ‘Objectives’ just show me the targets were trying to hit and how they break down across our regions” I heard them say. We accomplished this by setting a Key Result and then creating sub-Key Results and sub-sub Key results underneath. All creating a big tree of contributions that worked well for them. On the flip side, the other team was also focused on similar targets, but made them a part of a cohesive OKR that included more than just the targets themselves. As you can see above, both sets of goals across these teams included Key Results from the other. The difference was, rather than creating two different key results to track the same target, which would require two sets of owners and two sets of updates, we used the same single key result object and multi-aligned it as both a sub-KR and to an Objective. You can see above, Viva Goals made this much easier to save time and keep them aligned. Multi-alignment strikes again. Aligning one KR to multiple Objectives The last example here is also like those above, but rather than aligning across levels or across goal objects, we’re aligning across teams. The biggest draw of having a more rigorous and managed goal setting program is the alignment you achieve across your company. Well, what’s the best way to achieve that alignment and make sure we’re all focused on the same outcomes? Sharing the same outcomes, of course! In many cases when I’m working with a team, new relationship or old, I like to have a conversation about where we can share the same outcomes to ensure that we’re both moving in the same direction. With Viva Goals we can quite literally share the same key results, even if they’re aligned to different Objectives or living alongside different other outcomes. I took a single key result object and multi-aligned that to two different objectives across two different teams, making sure they both are progressing towards a common outcome. How have you all been using multi-alignment?Coming this Wednesday....
Sneak peek of a slide from our Viva Goals Office Hours happening later this week (How to Build a High-Performing Team with Viva Goals)...join us for specific, tactical examples re: how to use Viva Goals to build a happier, more impactful team and organization. Register here!How to write great goals, get six-pack abs, and live forever
Your diet can often seem complicated, but writing great goals doesn't have to be. This blog post investigates how simple rules from diet and fitness experts can translate into writing great goals, ultimately distilling it down to 12 key words. How to write great goals, get six-pack abs, and live foreverHow to Drive Team Performance and Results with Viva Goals
Join us tomorrow for the How to Drive Team Performance and Results with Viva Goals at 9:00AM Pacific! In this conversation with Jeff Kotz, Director of the Microsoft Channel Alliance at McChrystal Group, and Kevin Cole, Implementation Program Manager, McChrystal Group will share their experience driving team performance with customers by improving strategy and goal alignment across teams, including real-world examples of how implementing Viva Goals is driving performance for organizations around the world. RSVP and add your questions now!
