![]() Your teams are fully distributed now, of course. WorkBoard really helped us empower our whole team all-around. But along the way, everyone benefited from the new visibility on a different level, especially as a remote-first company. People want to know what’s expected of them and what new habits will be put in place. There was some resistance, which is to be expected when introducing a whole new tool. But as a leadership team, it was an instance of: this is what we’re doing, and this is how we’re running the process, and then tightening that up and rolling it out. It helped that OKRs weren’t completely new, that we had run a few quarters in our own way. I think we were less consensus-driven and more prescriptive that this is what we’re doing. In retrospect, we probably could have taken a more phased approach, but we had such a sense of urgency. We went full out, full speed, zero to a hundred as quickly as we could. And, on top of that, to really leverage teams versus individuals in the process. Being able to separate the HR individual performance piece altogether and divorce it from OKR performance has been very helpful for us as well. And so when I started to see sort of that conflict, I thought that the easiest way to apply the methodology was going to be with a tool that actually is an extension of it. It felt very, very limited on that front.Īnd some of what they were preaching almost went against what I see as the core principles that WorkBoard is founded on, which are much more time-tested ideas behind OKRs. And that resonated because 7Geese gave us a lot in terms of individual performance management - we had these 360 reviews and all that kind of stuff going on - but it didn’t give us the full functionality of focusing on how the company was performing, how our teams were performing, where the gaps were, what do we want to celebrate, and what’s holding us back. I think one big thing that WorkBoard is all about is that it’s not an HR platform that helps you manage your strategy energy. And then it became clear that the tool that we were using was not the best tool. And that’s when I discovered WorkBoard’s certification program and signed up, which was incredibly helpful because it gave me a foundation to learn the methodology, how to apply it - both the theoretical and the practical - and learn from other people in the group. So I wondered, does this really work, and why are we so bad at it? I started to dig into OKRs, researching and learning from what other organizations were doing - just trying to soak up everything I could about OKRs. And while the process was clarifying, it was also somewhat demoralizing because it was Q4, and we just got our goals in place. The first time we ran the process, it took us nearly a month to have goals in place. We had people with varying degrees of experience, including a tech leader who joined us from Google who was fairly proficient in OKRs - but most of the team had never fully experienced them. And those walls became visible as the core of all of the interpersonal conflicts that we had been dealing with over time - and that’s when I championed OKRs and Workboard.Ī few quarters prior, we tried to run OKRs on our own. That tension builds up, and, as it does, walls start to build between teams that should be collaborating together. And so, even before we had OKRs and WorkBoard, there was a shared realization that we needed something - because our misalignment was showing up day-to-day as unspoken tension. It was! It was a deeply troubling yet cathartic moment that we all experienced together. That sounds like a transformational experience. ![]() So that was the catalyst for us to start thinking about how to bring people together, how to think about our strategy, and how to get organized and work better together. We left that retreat wondering how even though we are a small company, we could be working against each other. And then we had our customer success talk about what they were doing - which was in the complete opposite direction of the engineering team! They conflicted with each other, and it was then that we had the epiphany that, as a team, we were not aligned at all - it was a wake-up call for us. And in this conversation, we had our engineering team talk about what that they were doing. ![]() Mike Giordani, Co-founder of Lingo Live: Well, first of all, I’m a huge OKR fanatic! At our retreat a few years ago, we had this open conversation about what’s working and what’s not working. WorkBoard: What drew you to OKRs and WorkBoard? Mike talks about how OKRs drive asynchronous communication and alignment for the global team at Lingo Live. We sat down with Mike Giordani, Co-founder of Lingo Live, to talk about how they’re using OKRs and some of their victories on the path to becoming a stronger, more resilient team.
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