It's personal
In the previous post I talked about the way that frameworks (particularly ones for goal setting, like OKRs) frequently become more about maintaining the framework than achieving the outcome.
I suggested this is a "karate kid" problem - looking at the finger and not the moon - and that it's only through the right leadership that we can keep our eyes on the desired outcome and not get lost in the methodology.
Today I want to talk about why supplying this leadership is hard - and illustrate another challenge inherent in goal-setting.
In the first post in this series, I said that goal-setting is at the heart of organisational life. We come together in organisations to achieve things we cannot do as individuals, and in order to do things together we need a shared sense of what it is that we are doing1.
That "shared sense" means that we look at the world and identify similar patterns (problems to solve, work to be done, etc) and give priority to similar things (this piece of work is most important, this feature of a product or service is most valuable or impactful).
But here's the catch: our view of the world, and our sense of what is important, is deeply personal. For most of us, it is a very significant part of who we are. To revisit a favourite quote of mine:
“What an organism does, as William Perry says, is organize; and what a human organism organizes is meaning. Thus it is not that a person makes meaning, as much as that the activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making.”
- Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self
To do goal-setting we need to have conversations about what does and doesn't matter. These conversations are not easy. Inevitably, we will disagree, and we will be asked to give up some of our beliefs. Things that are deeply cherished to us on a personal level will be revealed to be less important than we thought, and we will hear a painful 'no' to our request to continue with them.
Very often I think we are secretly hoping that a framework will spare us from these conversations, because they can be uncomfortable. We are social animals. We have strong feelings about relationships. Most of us find physical pain infinitely preferable to the pain of rejection and conflict. But if we orient to frameworks (or tools2) in this way, then the conversations will still not happen - only now we will also have a complicated or expensive system to maintain. The answer, as I said in the previous post, is leadership. Leadership does not mean ‘magically not feeling discomfort when challenging people’. It means facing that discomfort and having those conversations anyway.
The solution to this problem starts with you: you have to embrace the awkwardness of talking about the difficult things. This means saying more of the stuff that has your name on it, however uncomfortable. You have to be the first to take the step.
And for your team, it's back to one of the perpetual themes of this blog: relationships. When people have good relationships at work, when they feel secure, then it becomes easier to take risks and go to uncomfortable places. And the way to build good relationships is to model and invite them through good management.
If you agree with this proposition, are you allocating time to maintain this shared view of the world?
This argument applies equally to the ‘all singing, all dancing’-type project management software (like Monday.com, Clickup, etc) as it does to frameworks (like OKRs).