okr workshops for leadership teams
Set fewer goals, measure them honestly and get every team working towards them. OKR facilitation that turns your strategy into results your people own.
Most leadership teams know what OKRs are - Objectives and Key Results. However, few get them to work. The objectives sound right at the beginning, the key results go into a spreadsheet, and by the end of the quarter nobody can remember what they were aiming at or whether they hit it. Goals that nobody looks at after week two don't change how your team works.
A Turning Leaf OKR workshop gives your leadership team a structured, facilitated conversation to agree the objectives that matter most, set key results that reflect progress, and cascade them so each team sets its own goals in support. When your leaders build the goals together, they deliver them.
what is an okr workshop
and how can it help you?
Your OKR facilitator guides your leadership team through setting clear objectives (the what) and the measurable key results (the how), then helps you allocate them so every team is working towards the same outcomes.
OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, are a goal-setting method developed by Andy Grove at Intel and later taken to Google by John Doerr. The idea is simple. You set a small number of objectives that describe what you want to achieve, and under each one you set two to four key results that show whether you are getting there. It is just choosing the things that matter, deciding how you will measure them, and then committing to them as a team.
This is very different from a consultant handing you a goal framework, or the CEO drafting the OKRs over a weekend and presenting them to you on Monday. When one person or one function writes the goals, everyone else treats them as someone else's targets. When a skilled external facilitator runs the process, your leaders surface the real priorities, argue them together, make clear choices, and leave with objectives and key results they have committed to.
Your Turning Leaf facilitator designs the process so that once your leadership team has set the direction, each team translates it into its own aligned objectives and key results. People work harder for goals they helped write.
benefits: what you get with an expert okr facilitator
1
Focus on What Matters
OKRs make your leadership team choose. Instead of thirty competing priorities, you leave with three to five objectives and an agreed view of what you are leaving out to make room for them.
2
Leadership Alignment on the Goals
This may be the single biggest reason to run the workshop. When every leader has agreed the same objectives, your executives go back to their teams carrying one set of aligned goals, not six.
3
Key Results You Can Measure
An objective without a measurable key result is useless. Your facilitator pressure-tests every key result so it measures an outcome rather than activity, and you know by quarter's end whether you hit it.
4
Ownership Through the Cascade
Teams that write their own key results in support of the company's objectives are far more committed to delivering them than teams handed a target. A well-designed cascade builds that ownership from the start.
5
Honest Accountability
Every key result has a named owner and a regular check-in. Progress is tracked in the open, so problems get raised early.
6
Strategy Made Practical
OKRs connect your strategic plan to the work your people do each week. The plan on a page becomes a short list of measurable results that everyone can see and act on.
when to use an okr workshop?
An OKR workshop is the right investment when your leadership team needs to agree on goals that matter, make them measurable, and get the whole organisation working towards them.
You don't need to be new to OKRs to get value from a facilitated workshop. Many of our clients have tried them before. If your goals keep ending up in a drawer, the problem is rarely the framework. It’s usually the way the goals were set and handed down.
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You are about to start a new quarter, financial year or planning cycle and want goals that are clear, focused and owned by the leaders who will deliver them.
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Your team has tried OKRs or another goal-setting method before, but the goals lost momentum and were quietly forgotten.
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You’ve finished your strategy planning and now need to turn the plan into specific, measurable goals your teams can act on.
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Your leaders are pulling in different directions, with each function chasing its own targets and no shared set of objectives across the leadership team.
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A new leadership team, a restructure or a period of rapid growth means you need to align quickly on what matters most.
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You want to cascade goals through the whole organisation and build commitment
why choose turning leaf for your okr workshop?
We have spent two decades helping leadership teams across hundreds of Australian organisations turn strategy into committed action. OKRs are one of the best tools for doing that, but only when the goals are set well and cascaded with care. Most OKR programs fail on the process, not the framework, and the process is what we do.
At Turning Leaf, we believe a plan built together is a plan that gets done, and the same is true of every objective and key result. We have no goal-tracking software to sell and no proprietary framework to impose. Our job is to help your leaders have the hard conversation about priorities, agree how success will be measured, and commit to it as a team.
Our facilitators have all held senior leadership roles in major organisations. They understand the pressure your leaders are under and the politics that can derail a goal-setting session. They know how to turn a long list of competing priorities into a short list of measurable goals your team will deliver
turning leaf proven 6-step process
1. Discovery and pre-work
Before your workshop, we conduct pre-workshop interviews with key participants and, where appropriate, a survey of your leadership team. We look at your strategy, any goals or KPIs already in place, and the priorities competing for attention. This surfaces the issues and tensions, so your facilitator is familiar with your business and the goals you most need to set. There are no surprises on the day.
2. Agenda design
Your workshop agenda is built around your planning cycle and the outcomes you need, not a generic template. We decide together which conversations need to happen, in what order, and how much time each deserves. We leave room for the debate that good goal-setting needs while keeping energy and momentum high throughout.
3. Framing the challenge
We brief all participants on the process, and on how OKRs work. When people arrive knowing the difference between an objective and a key result, and what a good one looks like, the group can get straight to the work that matters.
4. Your workshop: objectives and key results
On the day, your Turning Leaf facilitator leads your leadership team through agreeing the objectives that matter most, and what you will leave out. For each objective, the group sets two to four key results and tests every one. Can we measure it? Is it an outcome or just an activity? Can the progress be measured? The facilitator drives, but never influences. The thinking and the ownership stay with your team.
5. Building the cascade
Before your workshop closes, your facilitator works with your leaders on how the company objectives will flow to each team. Teams use them as the frame for setting their own aligned objectives and key results, instead of receiving a list of targets. Every key result has a named owner.
6. Post-workshop output and review rhythm
We provide a structured summary of the objectives, key results, owners and decisions from the day, delivered the next day while the momentum is fresh. We also help you set a simple check-in rhythm so your OKRs are reviewed regularly, not filed and forgotten. Many clients return to this document throughout the cycle as the record of what was agreed.