Personal OKRs 🎯 for your direct reports
Personal development OKRs for your direct reports
Career without a clear goal and direction is like driving a plane ✈️ without a proper navigation system 🧭. You may not know where you will end up. Every engineer is in the driver seat when it comes to their career, but as a manager, you hold shared responsibility as well in your direct report’s career in facilitating them.
Your direct report and you should always be asking this question for them: WHAT'S THE NEXT BIG THING IN THEIR CAREER? - this keeps them engaged and motivated in the longer run and find a purpose in their career and being part of your team.
How do you help your direct reports set their personal development goals?
Have you used objectives and key results as a goal setting model for your teams and organization? For a change, how about setting it up for your direct reports to achieve their personal development goals?
In this post, let’s take a look at how to set personal OKRs tailored to your direct reports’ personal development needs, facilitate, track and see the improvements happening.
Career peaks 🏔
In everyone’s career, there will be few career peaks and career lows. Setting and achieving personal OKRs will create career peaks on a regular basis and give you and your direct report a system to understand how your direct report can attain it. In a year, there should be at least 2-3 career peaks that your teammate should have climbed - that’s the success of them and you as a manager.
Sit with your teammate and plot how the career peak can look like after you define their learning OKRs and how many peaks they can climb in a year.
What is an OKR model?
To keep it brief, OKR stands for objectives and key results that businesses use as a goal setting technique to achieve its targets. Objectives are specific and clearly defined goals that should be challenging but attainable, and align with org’s strategic goals. Key Results are a clear measure of progress made on your objectives. Objective is considered to be met once the key results are 100% achieved.
Let’s take a look at few OKR examples in the industry to make it more clear for you:
OKR: Increase your product’s brand awareness in 2023.
Key Results:
Gain at least 10,000 new followers on TikTok
Create 15 influencer partnerships
Increase conversion rates by 3%
How can you achieve your key results? - You’ve to get into the action. Initiatives are planned to achieve key results set and you have to scope them clearly that indicates achievement.
Without further ado, let’s see how to use this model in setting personal goals for your direct reports and see how it works out.
Set 🎯
To set personal development objectives for your direct reports, start with this question “what are your career goals? What do you want to learn and improve?”. Don’t expect a clear and detailed answer as some of them would have thought about it already whereas others wouldn’t. You may even need to sit with them and brainstorm about what skills they lack, what they might be willing to do in their career and sort it out. Here is a useful template from Miro for your brainstorming: https://miro.com/miroverse/career-development-canvas that I tried myself with my direct report and found handy.
Intrinsic or extrinsic motivators
You might reach a point where they say that they want to be in “X” position in “Y” years. This is where it starts to get tricky. Do they know what “X" entails? What are the skills they have to learn and exhibit? Plotting out a skill matrix would be greatly helpful at this point and explicitly ask them what they are good at and what they aren’t.
I would advise against setting them an objective as “I want to be promoted to Principal Engineer in 2 years”. Instead set it as “Gain skills of a principal engineer” as this could help you in checking their readiness to take up additional responsibilities but doesn’t promise promotion immediately as this personal OKR is purely from a developmental perspective. And promotion conversation can be undertaken separately with them.
Remember: In the very beginning, resist your temptation to propose any development improvements unless you were asked for. You can nudge them and direct them in the right direction but not yet propose. Hear them out in the purest form, that is, directly coming out from their heart.
OKR
Objective: Gain skills of a Principal Engineer
Key Result: Learn event driven architecture and improve your system metrics by X%
Key Result: Lead 2 impactful projects that exhibit principal engineer skills
Key Result: Deliver 2 technical presentations in a quarter
See above goals as a learning opportunity for your direct reports rather than a strict criteria and ensure them the same - after all it’s a personal development goal.
Next up, decide on the initiatives and timeline to achieve the objective and key results set. Typically, the whole objective might take 3-6 months to achieve, sometimes even a year depending on the scope.
How many objectives can be set?
Set not more than 2 objectives at a time so that it doesn’t feel overwhelming to them and they can set their focus on achieving them and move on to the next objective.
Facilitate 🫴
Once personal OKRs are set, you have to facilitate your direct report in achieving them in the best possible way. You should facilitate time, resources and environment for them to achieve their personal OKR goals.
Time
Without time, one couldn't achieve their personal goals set. Day in and out, your engineers work on projects that your team is delivering. Are they learning something out of those projects and does it improve their career prospects or is it one another project that they feel mundane and feel they didn’t learn anything new? - some personal goals can be tied up to the projects and in fact that works in the best of interest of both parties (you and your team mate).
Some personal goals are purely from a learning perspective for which they may not get a chance to work on the projects but learn from outside and implement inside your team.
Arrange them the necessary time to make progress on their personal OKRs every sprint. How much time they can utilize for personal OKRs varies from person to person, but roughly could be in the range of 10-15% in a sprint - that will come up to 12 hours in a 80-hour sprint.
Resources
How do they get access to resources to learn as part of their personal OKR goal? - Are they looking for a specific course in Udemy or O’Reilly or in any other learning platforms? Are they looking for someone to guide 1-1 who is an expert in the industry? (it can be you but doesn’t necessarily have to be).
Once they identify learning resources, facilitate them with approvals or if you have a point of contact in your network who can help this individual in learning and progressing further on their goals.
Environment
Environment is from 2 different perspectives:
the environment in which they are in - people, culture, process around them
the platform where they can learn and exhibit
To pursue such personal OKRs, it needs to be centered around the right people, right culture and right processes with one thing a clear priority, learning and continuous improvement. As an engineering manager, it will be your primary responsibility to establish such an environment where everyone knows each other's personal OKRs, and help them to achieve.
Does your teammate Bob know the personal OKRs of teammate Alice? vice versa?
Personal learning goals of your teammates
are not trade secrets; it needs to be shared among your team. Without knowing each other’s personal learning goals, how could you expect them to learn, share among each other?
Next comes the platform where they can learn and exhibit. A tool for technical learning and experimentation, A stage for presentation, A messaging channel where they are allowed to make mistakes and learn from them to improve their written communication skills - is all what they need.
Track 📈
Once the personal learning OKRs are set and facilitated, track them on a regular basis. Check how your teammate is progressing on their goals and where they need help. Having milestones defined would greatly help to track the progress and understand where there is a bottleneck.
Do they feel overloaded with project work that they couldn’t spend allotted time for their personal goals?
Are they unsure about how to proceed once they get stuck?
Do they feel a lack of motivation?
Understand what are the challenges faced in making progress and provide them moral and logical support by motivating them, helping them regain time and focus that they deserve for learning.
Achieve 🏅
Finally the time has come. After all the hardships and effort your direct report had put in, they will reap some fruits. Once they achieve their personal OKRs, it’s time to share their learnings and celebrate with them. Genuine appreciation is forgotten in some teams which in fact acts as a fuel to run the engine further.
Personal OKR can also be set for yourself. Consult with your manager, define it and go for it.
Thank you for coming this far! It is indeed a long read but I wanted to make sure personal OKRs are being explained in all different perspectives along with my personal experience for you to apply in your teams.
Have you used a similar goal setting model for you and your direct reports and how do you find this personal OKRs model? Love to know your thoughts and feedback in the comment.