How can OKRs help you in becoming a better leader?

OKRs help you in becoming

Woven amongst the larger discussions of remote work, technological development, and forthcoming IPOs – it’s quite fascinating to see publications highlight CEO after CEO in engaging dialogues about leadership, establishing a growing business, and maintaining the wellness of the workforce. This just proves that if you want your business to grow, attract funding and perform at a superior level, you have to do everything in your capacity to become an effective leader and act like one. The OKR program is serving as one such popular approach that helps you to limit leadership wrong turns and lead by example to expertly scale your business. 

OKRs help you in becoming

At its core, effective leadership is about rigging your workforce with correct information and the best possible tools for enabling them to do perform at their best and deliver on the organizational objectives. It is all about directing, encouraging, motivating your workforce, and celebrating with them when they achieve the desired results. The OKR (Objectives and Key result) methodology enables you to do all of this and lead your team effectively. But before we begin discussing how OKR can be used to become an effective leader, let us take a quick glance at a few tips for improving your leadership skills:

Important tips to improve leadership skills

Managers having poor management skills fail to inspire their teams and lead effectively. Therefore, it is extremely crucial to enhance your skills if you ever want your teams to be productive and your organization to be successful. Following are a few tactics that can be used for you to improvise your leadership skills:

1. Discovering your leadership style

The initial step for improving your leadership skills is to discover the type of manager you currently are. This will help you in determining your own strengths and weaknesses. 

a. Democratic – They seek the response of their teams before making decisions. 

b. Pacesetting – They set the pace of the work and expect others to follow in their steps. 

c. Autocratic – They make decisions without taking any input from the teams. 

d. Affiliative – They have a personal connection with their teams and use the knowledge for providing guidance. 

e. Laissez-Faire – They provide minimal guidance and let teams do what appears to be necessary.

f. Coaching –  They educate their teams but provide minimum direction and allow them to make their own decisions. 

2. Communicate with your team

Regardless of the type of leader you might be, it is vital for you to have clear and regular communication with your team members. Use these discussions to have an idea about which leadership kind will work the best for your team. If you fail to have an open line of communication with your team and have a well-established communication strategy, you will fail to have a sense of how they have been performing in their roles. It will also lead you to fall out with what your employees desire from you as a leader. 

3. Setting specific objectives

By setting specific objectives, you stimulate the motivation of your team members for achieving those objectives. This is where Objective and Key Results (OKRs) come in handy and play an effective role.  The reason OKR tools work so well as it enables you and your organization to narrow down the focus to a handful of high-impactive goals. Limiting the number of objectives a team will focus on within the specific quarter helps in funneling the resources and efforts to the objectives that matter the most to the organization, while the key results help in determining whether these objectives have been attained or not. 

Why OKRs are vital for effective leadership? 

In the modern and competitive business world, things change in the blink of an eye. The only way through which leaders can stay right on track is by adopting the best approaches swiftly. The OKR tool is a compelling and pretty straightforward goal-establishing methodology that organizations are using to enhance their strategy, execution, alignment, and engagement. 

Strategy shifting

Organizations often fail at delivering their strategic plans and just a handful of them attain their desired objectives. In such a fast-paced world where things are altering at record speed, the OKR program helps leaders to determine the fundamental drivers that enable the organization to attain its strategic objectives. It enables the teams to close the gap between the strategies and execution and steer clear of time and money-consuming distractions. 

Complete alignment: 

A growing business is always at the risk of misalignment and miscommunication as responsibilities are entrusted to multiple teams. When teams work in silos, they lack proper communication. Teams that do not communicate regularly cannot work towards the common objective that sends the various sectors of the business in different directions. This lack of collaboration makes it just impossible for the organizational objectives to be achieved. OKR program enables you to align all of your units to the overall mission and vision of the organization. It makes it possible to attain both horizontal and strategic alignments. 

Enhances engagement: 

Employee engagement is vital, no matter if your organization is at the initial steps or is already well-established. OKRs enable active discussions between different organizational teams with their leaders. Such participatory conversations bring everyone to the board and offer them the chance to make decisions. Numerous studies and research have revealed that routine meetings and touch bases improve the productivity of the employees. The OKR program has become a renowned methodology that has been helping organizations to thrive and leaders to become effective. Contact us now to get your organization on board with OKRs!

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Gaurav Sabharwal

CEO of JOP

Gaurav is the CEO of JOP (Joy of Performing), an OKR and high-performance enabling platform. With almost two decades of experience in building businesses, he knows what it takes to enable high performance within a team and engage them in the business. He supports organizations globally by becoming their growth partner and helping them build high-performing teams by tackling issues like lack of focus, unclear goals, unaligned teams, lack of funding, no continuous improvement framework, etc. He is a Certified OKR Coach and loves to share helpful resources and address common organizational challenges to help drive team performance. Read More

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