Measure what matters

OKR means Goals and Key Results; where “O” is for target and is what  the company wants to achieve.  “KR” is for key results and is what the company needs to see in each specific time period to achieve the goal.

CFR stands for Conversations, Feedback and Acknowledgment. These elements, along with OKRs, are critical to the Continuous Performance Management (™) process and is how each employee in your workforce can be motivated to achieve today’s goals and develop their skills to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Continuous Performance Management replaces the universally loathed and ineffective annual performance review with a valuable, ongoing process that really works for the organization.

OKRs demystified

Doerr dedicates the first part of Measure What Matters to a deep dive in the OKRs. He shares, with insightful and behind-the-scenes stories, how the use of OKRs helped transform Google, YouTube, Intuit, Nuna, and others into the hits we know today. Recommends at least a quarterly review of OKRs to allow for timely course correction and to support an agile response from the entire organization to unavoidable changes in the market.

A critical element of why OKRs work so well is their transparency up, down, and across the organization. This transparency allows each person in the workforce to see how they scale up to the organization’s most important goals. This visibility and alignment are critical to recruiting, attracting, and retaining the best talent needed in all high-growth organizations.

Inglés Las explicaciones de Doerr hacen que los OKR sean accesibles, eliminando toda intimidación en torno a este proceso estratégico. Doerr’s explanations make OKRs accessible, removing all intimidation around this strategic process. The reader walks away understanding how OKRs are truly a glass bullet for growth and can be applied to all companies, in any industry, at any part of a business life cycle.

OKRs + CFR = Continuous performance management

In the second half of his book, Doerr introduces Continuous Performance Management and these key elements: Conversations, Comments, and Acknowledgment (CFR). Doerr describes CFRs as “giving OKRs to your human voice.”

Team members want and need real and authentic relationships with their managers. This trust is necessary for effective coaching, feedback and development, and it is through talking together about work and life that this trust is built.

To positively influence performance, coaching and feedback should be done continuously, not saved for a scheduled review schedule. Feedback also needs to flow bi-directionally and between peers. This is especially important as the world of work has moved from a hierarchy to one in which problems are solved in cross-functional teams.

Positive recognition must also be ongoing, both from managers and their peers. And, most importantly, rewards and must be individualized for each employee. This is especially important for high-performing employees who need to see their outsized contributions pay off appropriately, both financially and with unique opportunities to learn, develop new skills, and take on new challenges.

To illustrate the power of ongoing performance management, Doerr includes more real-life stories from Lumeris, Zume Pizza, Coursera, Adobe, and more. He shares how each business benefited from a highly motivated and engaged workforce when they transformed their old performance review cycles into an ongoing performance management program.