Taking yourself out of the day-to-day running of your firm for even a short period of time to focus on your future strategic objectives can sometimes seem like a pipe dream.
You’re likely too busy firefighting - dealing with your team, your clients and the HMRC deadlines - to even think about the important strategic priorities of your firm or to wonder about your firm's strategic health.
But while setting strategic objectives and focusing on your strategic health might be difficult, it is invaluable to the future success of your firm.
In his book Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains OKRs. His passion is based on their simplicity and their power to help teams identify and accomplish their goals.
OKR stand for Objectives and Key Results, a simple goal-setting system that provides a structured way for teams and individuals to set and achieve their goals.
OKRs help to create clarity, focus, accountability, alignment and momentum to deliver real results.
OBJECTIVE – This is the WHAT – What do you want to achieve?
The objective should be significant, concrete, action-oriented and inspiring.
The objective should be hard, but achievable. The point is to push yourselves as a team. As Doerr writes: “When properly designed and deployed, the objective is a vaccine against fuzzy thinking — and fuzzy execution.”
KEY RESULTS – This is the HOW – How you are going to achieve your objective?
Key results should be specific and time-bound, aggressive, yet realistic, quantifiable and verifiable, enabling you to set measurable milestones to monitor your progress.
Used correctly, OKRs will help you work out and execute the objectives of your firm.
The true power of OKRs comes from setting the right strategic objective for your firm and team, and then working together to track and measure its progress.
Click the button below to fill out a strategic health questionnaire that will deliver to you an assessment on the health of your firm. You can use this information to work out your strategic focus for the next 13 weeks, the 'without fail OKR' that you must achieve to move your firm forward.