“Make your Objective inspirational,” they said. So you wrote: “Become the industry leader.” Now — what strategy is hidden in that sentence?
“Key Results must have numbers,” they said. So you wrote: “Increase customer count” and “Grow revenue.” Here’s some bad news: those can’t be KRs. Those are your company’s vital signs — your KPIs.
Result: OKRs were written incorrectly. A success scale was bolted on. From the team came this feedback: “What’s the difference between this and the old performance review system?”
And it failed.
Why Does This Keep Happening?
Because OKR is almost always introduced as a goal-writing exercise. But OKR is a goal-setting protocol. Starting OKR without knowing which tool belongs where is like opening a toolbox and assuming every tool does the same job.
5 Rules: Use Every Tool in Its Right Place
1. OKR is not a performance system — it’s a goal-setting protocol.
The moment you use OKR for performance evaluation, your people stop managing the goal. They start managing the score.
2. KPIs cannot be dressed up and written as Key Results.
Revenue, customer count, NPS — these are your company’s health indicators. They are KPIs, not KRs. Your actual performance system is built with KPIs.
3. OKRs cannot be buried inside KPI tables.
OKR’s most powerful property is the alignment it creates across teams. An OKR buried inside a KPI spreadsheet loses that property entirely.
4. OKR cannot stand alone.
A company without OKR has no navigational direction. But a company without KPIs will find that OKR degenerates into a to-do list. Remove KPIs, and you’re left drowning in an unmanageable pile of disconnected goals.
5. KPI cannot stand alone.
Health indicators tell you where you are today — not where you’re going. A company running only on KPIs can maintain the status quo. It cannot advance.
Read on to go deeper into each of these.
Dilek Mete — Agile Team Architect | OKR & CFR Coach