OKR - how a team became a team
How a team became a team and really makes a difference in the process.
Starting Point
Efficiency, leadership, delegating and developing junior staff, communication and trust - all still more wish than reality and not yet where the team actually wants to be and should be. The fourth leadership meeting of its kind takes place, the time in between: 2 years. The third level leadership team has renewed by 30% since then and the topics are still the same as at the beginning.
Accusations, hedging, resignation and above all frustration spread and determine the course of the meeting and the use of expensive time.
Challenge
All the team knows is crisis situations. First a pandemic and a slump in sales, then the war of aggression in Ukraine, followed by inflation and an energy crisis, and again a reluctance to buy. Changing the team culture in this situation is more than just a stress test for a team that is not quite ready for it.
Efficiently handling day-to-day business to secure the company's existence, delivering performance and taking permanent cost pressure into account are the imperatives of every working hour. Advancing development topics that have a positive impact on both efficient day-to-day business and increased performance sounds great, but seems nothing but esoteric.
Role
Our role:
Facilitator, moderator, motivator, enabler or in other words: change professional with industry know-how 😊
Solution
Breaking down big visions into smaller annual goals, forming cross-functional teams and working on them in quarterly slices - is called OKR.
Transparency of available capacities, really focusing only on what makes sense as the next goal for the company, agreeing with everyone on it and doing nothing else for 3 months.
In short: transparency, focus and alignment is the value framework of OKR. (Disruptions can actually usually be traced back to one of the 3 points).
The company broke up the previous system with OKR and continuously formed new OKR sets every quarter for 1 year on relevant development topics that matched the culture and resilience of the teams. As the teams defined their own objectives in OKR, they themselves became the biggest change agents in the respective change and drove the issue. Through measurable Key Results, all change sponsors from the leadership team to the executive team were able to fulfill their role and support the process.
Ergebnis
Was hat's gebracht?
Deutliche Steigerung von Effizienz und Ownership - die Teams haben selbst ihre Themen entwickelt und die Verantwortung dafür übernommen. Die Teams verschiedener Bereiche lernten sich besser kennen und schätzen, Kommunikation wurde gestärkt und Vertrauen konnte wachsen. Oder anders ausgedrückt: es ist ein echtes Team entstanden.