Objectives and Key Results: How Navigating Travelling Organizations Might Succeed

Abstract

The need for travelling organizations is obvious, due to our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments. Thus, organizations have to explore new ways of navigation as long-term strategies and decisions do not fit these needs any longer. A new holistic agility is needed which enables organizations, leaders, and employees to succeed. Besides an agile mindset, new frameworks are needed. These have to answer actual needs in travelling organizations, e.g., orientation and flexibility at the same time. At this point, the OKR Framework (Objectives and Key Results) seems to be one way to meet these expectations. In this chapter, the framework and its answers to the needs of travelling organizations are described. First, a short overview of the framework itself is given. Second, there is a look at holistic agility. This is described in the first book of the series “Three Pillars of Organization and Leadership in Disruptive Times” (Wollmann et al., 2020)—as the DNA of travelling organizations. A proper look at how Objectives and Key Results cover and foster this concept will then be taken. At this point, four perspectives are relevant: agile mentality, self-reflection, readiness to embrace change, and willingness to deliver. Third, there is a deep dive into a concrete challenge regarding the implementation of Objectives and Key Results in a—more or less—traditional organization: In this case, Management by Objectives is one of the key leadership and controlling tools which is incorporated and covers an individual performance and compensation system. A shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation by fostering such a new (agile) culture is not enough to compensate, motivate, and retain high performers in teams. To get closer to a new way of individual compensation while using the Objectives and Key Result Framework and keep up motivation on a team level, new connections between team- and individual bonus systems are needed. The different steps of this change will be discussed: From a coexistence of a bonus system on an individual level and OKRs to an integration phase into a full transformation. Furthermore, some concrete take-aways for handling such challenges are given.