Community Lessons: What are OKRs? (Exercise)

(If this post is difficult to read, here's an eye-friendly alternative.)

You’ll hear the term OKRs used by the Community Team, and you may have even seen some posts about them. Ambassadors use them, and even some Mentor Leaders as a way of managing and measuring team progress.

OKRs stand for objectives and key results, a goal-setting methodology used to set and track goals. This framework pairs the objectives you want to achieve with the key results you’ll use to measure progress—so your goals are tied to your team’s day-to-day work.

Simply put:
Objective: Where you’re going
Key results: How you track your progress getting there

Think of the key results as steps to take to reach the objective (goal).

We set goals for every domain, which includes all of the teams. Admins have their own, Ambassadors have their own, and the teams they oversee have their own. Having goals is how we determine where 7 Cups is going, and the intent is to grow in all areas of the community.

Examples of growth: team size, number of discussions hosted, how many new VLs see each month, etc. All of these are measurable, and by being specific we can look back on where we were, see where we are now, and continue to go up and up.

You may ask: why do we use OKRs over other frameworks? In practice, using OKRs is different from other goal-setting techniques because of the aim to set very ambitious goals. When used this way, OKRs can enable teams to focus on the big bets and accomplish more than the team thought was possible, even if they don’t fully attain the stated goal. OKRs can help teams and individuals get outside of their comfort zones, prioritize work, and learn from both success and failure.

If OKRs feel a little too business-y for you, I recommend starting with SMART goals (here’s a video!).

And this isn’t just for community advancement. We all need goals! Goals give us a roadmap to follow. Goals are a great way to hold ourselves accountable, even if we fall short. Setting goals and working to achieve them helps us define what we truly want in life.

With all that in mind, I have a fun exercise for everyone to do. Let's each try setting personal goals using OKRs. Here is one of my current personal objectives:

‍Objective: Lose weight by summer, measured by a 5 lb loss a month
Key Result 2: Drink at least 8 cups of water a day
Key Result 2: Do one workout video a day
Key Result 3: Do 10 pushups every day

^ I set this objective at the beginning of the quarter to give myself a 3-month timeframe.

Here are some more examples:

‍Objective: Save up 100 dollars for mom’s birthday gift
Key Result 1: Utilize a budget plan (ex. 50/30/20 rule)
Key Result 2: Reduce visits to Starbucks to twice a week
Key Result 3: Put x amount of money from each paycheck into savings

‍Objective: Learn French for next year’s trip
Key Result 1: Select a language app
Key Result 2: Spend at least an hour a day learning
Key Result 3: Pass each quiz at 90% or higher
Key Result 4: Meet with a language partner biweekly to practice

You can set as many KRs (key results) as you feel necessary. The standard is usually between 3 and 5 to be ambitious but reasonable.

Now you give it a try! Think of a goal, write it out in the above format, and share it with me in the replies! It can be a little challenging to grasp at first, so all questions are welcome!