Holacracy and OKR are two popular management methodologies used by businesses to improve productivity, streamline decision-making, and align goals across teams. While they have different approaches, integrating Holacracy and OKR can help businesses to create a more efficient and effective workplace, where teams are empowered to work towards common goals in a self-organized and transparent way.
Holacracy is a management philosophy that emphasizes self-organization and distributed decision-making. In a Holacracy-powered organization (but the same applies in other forms of self-management structures) it is even more frequent that misalignment arises and that people’s work is not aligned with the organizational medium- to short-term objectives. The lack of a hierarchical structure where somebody at the top tells the ones at the bottom of the org what to do is great to ensure that the right decisions are taken quickly from the ones that have more knowledge about the issue at hand. At the same time, though, the risk is that everybody is busy cutting trees to move through the forest without noticing if they are in the right forest.
Here come OKRs.
OKR, on the other hand, is a goal-setting and execution framework that helps organizations to ensure alignment around the strategic priorities of the business. It fosters great transparency and makes visible to everyone what needs to be achieved. It, then, encourages teams to set their own OKRs aligned with the organizational ones in a bottom-up approach.
Integrating Holacracy (or other forms of self-management) and OKR can help businesses to create a more effective and efficient workplace.
What do you expect to get when integrating these 2 methodologies?
A preliminary (and absolutely not comprehensive list) can be drafted as follows:
Increased Transparency: Holacracy and OKR both emphasize transparency and self-organization, which can help businesses to create a more open and transparent workplace;
Improved Decision-making: Holacracy's integrative decision-making process can help businesses to make more informed and collaborative decisions, which can lead to better outcomes;
Increased Accountability: OKRs provide a clear framework for setting and measuring goals, which can help to increase accountability and ensure that teams are working towards common objectives;
More Efficient Workflows: The alignment between organizational OKRs and team/circle ones can create more efficient workflows and ensure that teams are focused on achieving the goals that really matter.
Ok, it’s all wonderful!! But how to do it, in practice?
Well I am a consultant, hence you already know my answer: it depends :-D
In fact, every organization is different and the solution needs to be adapted to the specifics but I tried to outline a few key and general steps that can be followed and adapted as needed.
Define the strategic priorities of the organization.
OKRs are not a replacement for the strategy. Actually, OKRs are derived from strategy and they cannot help much if you don’t have defined where you area heading.
Depending on how the organization is structured what kind of roles do you have and who is accountable for what this can be done by a specific role/circle or as an integrative process to be done collaboratively (see also strategy definition in the Holacracy resources;
Define organizational OKRs.
These are the OKRs that the whole organization is set to achieve, the top priorities for the next period. As per the above, depending on the structure of the organization, this can be done in different ways;
Ask the circles to define their own OKRs aligned with the one defined by the whole organization and related to their accountabilities and purpose;
If the organization is small, put together different roles and let them take some of the KRs of a single OKR.
Align the whole set of OKRs:
The circles ones with the organizational ones and the circles’ ones between them;
The magic happens when implementation gets rhythm and execution becomes effortless: building a cadence in the day-to-day is the only way to guarantee success.
We are experimenting with this and things start to take good shape including an integration between OKRs cadence review meetings and tactical meetings. Do get in touch if you want to know more or if you think we can help.