The short answer
After we communicated these core behaviors, commissioned and handed out cool coins, put up posters and talked about them in meetings, we began to sense something was missing.
I lead NorthState’s Technology team, responsible for the networking, systems, business applications and security on which our company and customers depend. About 18 months ago, my team and I got really focused on articulating our culture and values. We have a solid set of corporate values but were looking for something more nuanced that would provide practical focus and clarity for our day-to-day operations. We settled on defining three core behaviors (thank you, Patrick Lencioni) as “Ensure Uptime, Delight the Customer, Solve the Problem.” So far, so good.
After we communicated these core behaviors, commissioned and handed out cool coins, put up posters and talked about them in meetings, we began to sense something was missing. The intent was for people to use these three phases as measuring sticks to help them make better decisions about what mattered day-to-day. Although the message resonated with our people, there was still a theoretical or philosophical color to it that kept them from being transformational. I don’t think we were expecting folks to get tattoos, but I did have clear expectations that we frame our thoughts and decisions along these lines.
Around this time last year, I read about Andy Grove’s Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). For those of you not familiar with them, John Doerr (@johndoerr ) did an excellent TED Talk that covers the whys and hows. The short version is that you get to dream about an objective that you would like to achieve that is significant, concrete, action-oriented and inspirational. Then, you define exactly how you will know when you achieve it. Two characteristics that make this effective are the fact that (1) they (both the objectives and results) are public for everyone on your team to see and (2) the results are measured quantitatively. It’s OK NOT to achieve all of your key results; if the goal is really significant, it may take longer than you thought.
We did three rounds of these last year. At the beginning of each round, every member of the Technology team would define an objective that supported one or more of our core behaviors and make it their own. We encouraged everyone to ‘look for the thing that has always bothered you about your job – the stupid process or convention, the inefficient workflow, the manual process that should be automated – and FIX IT.’
I would love to tell you that each round was a stellar success. They weren’t. The first round was as much a learning experience as anything else. We worked to get the bugs out of the process, expectations, and communication. We had to get some folks to understand why we were doing this crazy management thing when they had real work to do. We had some people just re-frame the work they were doing anyway into the OKR model to get us off of their backs. We persisted anyway.
By the end of the year, we began to see real enthusiasm for OKRs. On their own, our folks formed mini teams to work on more ambitious OKRs together. They proactively identified issues in our environment that were costing us money, impeding our ability to deliver uptime or making our customers less than happy. They were solving the problem, delighting the customer and ensuring uptime. We were effecting cultural transformation.
Our team completed 279 OKRs last year. Each one was an example of an individual team member taking ownership of an aspect of our core behaviors and doing their part to make them truly ‘core’.
2019 was a great year for OKRs, but I’m expecting 2020 to be even better. What could your team do?
/g
BTW- if you like the coin design, I commissioned it through *Upwork* with *Hiba*
Genn is the CIO/CISO for NorthState and can be found here: linkedin.com/in/glennrjohnson
