ESG Online Seminar – Team Execution Power 2.0 – How Google Uses OKRs to “Focus” and Boost Team Performances

The Executive Study Group (ESG) online seminar named “Team Execution Power 2.0 – How Google Uses OKRs to “Focus” and Boost Team Performances” was held by the ESG, Asia Pacific Institute for Strategy Limited (APIFS) on 26^th Feb 2021.   In the beginning, Dr. Mark Lee briefed the background, history and goal of Asia Pacific Institute for Strategy Limited (APIFS). 

Then he introduced different entrepreneur partners during Covid-19 period and published different research report for sharing.  Starting the talk, Dr. Mark Lee briefed the content included Google’s Dilemma, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), OKRs vs KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and 7 Way to Focus and Commit to Priorities.

Firstly, Dr. Mark Lee briefed the problem Google met in 2001 when they were growth upto 400 employees. The founders would like to remove the middle management layer that was very risky. They believed engineers could self-organize. But employee feedback that they would like to be managed.  

Then Dr. Lee asked us "Would Google's no management layer experiment succeed?" There is normal distribution (bell shape). 

And then Dr. Lee told us that John Doerr (VC) was one of board director in Google who suggested to use OKRs. 

John Doerr shared his experience who learnt from Andrew Grove (Former CEO, Intel) that “Priority is key for the change” and he believed that “management by objective” was useful for startup.

Then Google adopted OKRs and made it highly transparency.  Every staff understood the company OKRs, teams OKRs and personal OKRs.  “Top management mainly gave directions and other members set their own OKRs” said by Dr. Lee.

After that Dr. Mark Lee compared KPIs and OKRs under stable environment and unstable markets respectively.  The last item is critical that depends on company risk averse or aggressive & aspirational!

Dr. Lee asked a poll that “To what extent are your compensations linked to your KPIs performance?” Most of us replied “Relevant”.

Finally, Dr. Lee briefed the 7 way to focus and commit to priorities and they were:

1.      Start with your Purpose

2.      Listen to the Frontlines

3.      Publish Your Own Goals

4.      Communicate Priorities with Rationale

5.      Set  Challenging and Measurable Results

6.      Shorten Review Period

7.      Pair Quantity and Quality

He also briefed the dual direction approach for implementing OKRs.

After that poll 3 asked us “How receptive is your company to frontline staff’s ideas?”  Most of audience voted “Receptive”.

Dr. Lee also quoted Bill Campbell about CEO / founder should say that “This is what we’re doing”, and then CEO/founder have to model it.

Then poll 4 asked “How transparent can you see your supervisor’s personal goals and results?” The highest rating was “Ambiguous”, indicating that most of management without shared their own KPI.

And then poll 5 was “How challenges are your performance goals?” It is not surprised that most selected difficult and very difficult goals.

Lastly, Dr. Lee introduced “Pair Quantity and Quality” in OKRs.  He said usually each objective had three key results.  One of key results could be set related to quality. 

At the end, the last poll was “Which strategy is the most inspiring to you?”  It was quite even distributed and the highest vote was “Communicate Priorities with Rationale”.

The next seminar in Mar related to Netflix.

Reference:

Asia Pacific Institute for Strategy Limited (亞太策略研究所有限公司) – www.apifs.org

ESG facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/esg08