Bridging Learning and Development Goals Through Strategic OKR Alignment

Introduction

Nolan: Welcome to the Learning and Development podcast sponsored by Infopro Learning. As always, I’m your host, Nolan Hout. Joining me today, we have Andrew Barry, founder and CEO of Curious Lion, whose mission is to help growing companies develop their people in unique and engaging ways. Before this, Andrew was leading content for KPMG’s executive education and has held various leadership and individual contributor roles over 20 years in the field of learning and development.

Today, we’re going to talk with Andrew about an intersection of two acronyms very close to me, L&D, which we all know of learning and development, and OKRs, which are objectives and key results. And we’ll dig into those in just a second. And sorry, that’s all I’m going to share in the intro because I want to get into the topic. So, with that, Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Infopro Learning’s OKR Product Backstory

Andrew: Nolan, I am excited to be here. And I thought a cool way to start could be for you to share what about those two acronyms jumped out at you. I’ve been fascinated by how much traction that post has been getting. And I’m curious, what resonated there?

Nolan: Well, so selfishly, Andrew, what resonated with me, so Infopro Learning developed an OKR product, a product in the market that we bundled with our learning management system in our LXP platform. And so, I helped launch that product and get it off the ground. So, I know the OKR realm very well, very deeply. But when we pushed it out, we didn’t have a strong connect in L&D. We had some tangential opportunities and some things. And so, when I saw these two things, I thought, wow, I had one brain on, because that product ran almost as a separate business.

So, I had my one left side of my brain is all focused on this, our side is on L&D. And now I’m seeing this post talk about both of them. I was happy because it had so much engagement. I don’t know how many people ended up engaging with that. Hundreds, it was over 100 comments last time I saw. Over a thousand so, it was a happy moment for me because Infopro and myself, I’ve always felt that there’s no point of doing a learning program unless you can measure the impact of that thing.

Andrew: Over a thousand comments. It was nuts.

Nolan: You have a spend, you want to see the outputs of those. So, I always thought those two things should connect, closely, but I didn’t sense a lot of traction about trying to do that. Because a couple of companies had tried to connect performance management to LMS and it didn’t go well or too well. At least it was five years ago. So that’s what drew me to it.

Andrew: Exactly. I love that. I want to maybe learn more about that product if it makes sense in the conversation today, you’re the host. Where do you want to go from here?

Andrew’s Journey: KPMG to Curious Lion

Nolan: Well, first. Andrew, we can’t let you come on without learning more about you. I mean, you run your own business, obviously, but you did not do it in just one day. You had quite a bit of time at KPMG, as I mentioned, you’ve had various roles. So, help us just better understand your origin story. How did you get started? What led you on this path, eventually ending up with connecting the performance to learning via OKRs?

Andrew: So, I started back in South Africa, where I’m from, as a chartered accountant. My background is in accounting, finance, and business. But I very quickly got bored and over accounting and completely fell in love with the learning and development that we were going through as trainee accountants. So, we would go to an offsite, at least once a year, a week-long event. Those are the days. And I was just; I want to go and do what those guys are doing.

I did everything I could to get that job at KPMG. And I got that moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg. And I got to spend three weeks every month traveling to some part of the country teaching to other trainees and then partners eventually and it was awesome. I absolutely loved it. I fell in love with the field of developing potential, which is something you and I share in common.

And so, to speed up the story, I got transferred from Johannesburg to Montvale, New Jersey and then eventually the New York office of KPMG and I spent about 12 years there. So, working internally and then externally, you mentioned, selling exec ed. And so, got a little, again, back into the business side of it, trying to, how do we pitch these events? How do we sell this to clients? But so, and then I left KPMG. I was, always wanted to start my own thing, but I got this awesome stepping stone. Friends of mine had started a business in the hospitality industry doing high production value training for big, all big hotel brands.

So, they then headquartered in Geneva and then I helped them open a New York office and became head of learning for that company, they were later acquired by Ecolab. And so, I got to experience this world of high-quality production, video-based stuff, and I learned all about that. throughout this process, I was just thinking, there’s a better way to teach people this stuff, especially in what we would do a traditional approach at KPMG. And to me, it was some combination of these two things.

And, I set up my own shop eight years ago, Curious Lion. We just did, I was using the Royal We, you know, back in the day and I would just take on any projects I could. Eventually would staff up with contractors and freelancers and then, slowly built a business out of that. Now, we’ve, were talking offline, we’ve evolved into a specific focus, building high potential or developing programs for individual contributors. And then this connection to the OKR thing has become clear in the last, 12-18 months of doing that work.

The Viral Post: Framing the Idea

Nolan: So, let’s talk into that. That’s what led us to this, to you and I connecting. So, there’s a post from Andrew Barry, and I’ll just read it to you.

“I finally found a way to connect L&D to business results. Most L&D reporting stops at surveys in attendance. Useful? Sure, but disconnected from business results and invisible to the CFO. Here’s the opportunity. Your company’s OKRs already measure what matters most. What if you’re learning programs plugged directly into them?”

OKRs vs. KPIs

Nolan: So, that was the post you made, and you had offered some advice and we’ll get to that at the end as a good takeaway. Before we get into this concept, there’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s just start at the highest level. For those that don’t have OKRs in their companies and maybe are completely, I’ve never heard of that before, help us understand what are OKRs? What is the role in measuring what matters? to steal from the founder. Start with that and then we’ll kind of dissect this bit by bit.

Andrew: That’s a good starting point because I also realized in doing the post that not everyone knows what an OKR is, but everyone has the equivalent in a business and it’s mean, OKR stands for objective and key results. So, it’s the business priorities. It’s the vision for the business, but expressed in the specific outcomes that the business is going for. The actual term OKR has evolved out of Silicon Valley. John Doerr is the creditor, is kind of the main, if anybody wants to go down that rabbit hole half of their origin. But, how do I like to think about it almost everyone in L&D is familiar with KPIs?

So, like those things we mentioned like satisfaction like scores, right? That’s an example of a KPI. KPIs are like vital signs, right? So, like you know blood pressure heart rates like that kind of stuff and that’s an important thing to have in a business an OKR is like your, is like an exercise plan, right? So, it relies on the KPIs to know KPIs and key results are kind of similar, but the exercise plan has a future goal, right? I want to be able to run a marathon or set this time in a half marathon or whatever that is. And then the key results are like the signals you will use to know that you’ve achieved that goal, right? And so, you can see how the KPIs can kind of plug in there.

Marathon Analogy: Objectives and Results

Nolan: Those that are more familiar with KPIs, and if you go deep into this rabbit hole, you will be murdered for telling people that KPIs and OKRs have any similarities because people don’t make that analogy. So to simplify it, objective and key results, they’re two different things. You have an objective, which is your goal, your objective. I want to run a marathon.

Your key results are the KPIs, if you would, that will help you determine what you need to do to be able to hit that marathon. I want to be able to run 20 miles, I need to eat less junk food, eat, but the key component is one, it’s connected to this objective, and two, it has to be very measurable. That is the key. You have to be able to measure the outcome of this thing.

Connecting OKRs to Learning Impact

Nolan: You’re doing and again it’s very forward looking. And again, there’s so much nuance but we’re not going to get into the nuance because there’s unbelievably large amounts of nuance that get done there. Let’s talk about how they connect to learning. Where did you start to see this intersect and how is it so valuable?

Andrew: So, if you, if you just to simplify all of that, think of it as the priority business priorities, right? named business priorities. And so, so we, so we started running these programs for ICs at the request of a client about 18 months ago. And technically it’s experienced individual contributors. So, this is your four-to-six-year tenure.

And so, this client came to us and again, this is an important point for people. We didn’t, I didn’t just come up with this, it was, the clients were looking for this. So, after having done this for a few, for 18 or so months, we started to realize that, oh, a lot of companies could think this and probably will start to think this. And we can get into that, but that’s an important point, why people should be focusing on ICs specifically, because experienced ICs, because of AI and things like that, they’re going to become way more valuable.

As we go forward, AI enables people to do way more on their own. And that’s something to think about when you start to realize people can do become huge contributors and impact the business in ways that they don’t need to manage people. So, but anyway, we can come back to that idea. But we were building these programs for ICs and it was focused on the challenges they were going through. And it was all framed around driving more impact on their own. So, there was things like decision making was slow.

They were having meetings about meetings and a lot of it came down to cross-functional collaboration, communication, being able to influence without authority, those skills, which again, because I believe ICs is going to become more valuable, more irreplaceable, are skills that think companies should be prioritizing. So that was the genesis of it.

Cross-Functional Cohorts and Network Effects

Andrew: Then we started to think, and these were all cross-functional. So, we had people from product, from marketing, from customer success, from sales, all across the business, legal, finance. And I started to notice in our breakout room, so we would teach them, we’d teach how to ask better questions, is one of the modules, right? So, helping people understand customers, each other, that sort of thing. And so, they go into these breakout rooms and they start talking to each other and they come out and there’d be comments from someone in, you know, customer success and be like, I now finally get why legal is such a jerk sometimes.

I understand now I see their perspective. And I was like, I started to realize that we were not only getting delivering value by teaching them these skills, but we were actually delivering value by building a network. And people were getting an understanding of different functions and the standing of each other.

And then I realized that these people work on the same projects, you know, and a lot of those projects are framed as priorities or OKRs. And so, these skills were helping them directly influence the outcomes of those projects and those OKRs. So, then started to pitch that idea with our client and they were interested in it. I’ll end this by saying that the idea is incredibly nuanced, as you’ve said. And there’s a lot of edge cases.

It doesn’t always work in practice as simply as that. Pick an OKR, run the thing, right? There’s like different, so it’s a lot more layered, but you can legitimately show business impact or contribution as an L&D person if you follow this approach to tying your programs to OKRs.

Measure Value by Real Projects

Nolan: And what I tell people is, it’s an interesting concept depending on and what makes it nuances the way that orgs implement OKRs is different in every org. But if you, so if you almost just remove that acronym and you look at it more in a simple term and you say. We have highly influential projects that have measurable outcomes attached to them. If we’re able to fundamentally show how we can develop the skills of a person and those skills that they developed had a positive impact on that project. You have now connected those two things. In some ways, one of the big things is how are we going to show value? How are we going to show value? Well, we already have, if you have an OKR tool, something similar, the business has told you what they find value in. They’ve already defined it. All you got to do now is connect to it. Say, hey, I’m going to hop on this train.

I understand that we’re trying to launch a new cloud product in the next three months. And my job in marketing is to, I don’t know, generate a customer list and develop a ICP and develop all these different things. Okay, well, how can L&D support the development of this person to go do those things? And as a group, once that job is done, L&D can say, here was our role. It really is a way. It’s an interesting way to say what is the person already being measured on today?

Let us understand the influence on that versus saying what is the L&D program we want, let us measure the input, then let us create our own measurement criteria to pull just for the sake of L&D versus saying I’m just going to attach to what the business has, the business has found value in it. It’s a monumental shift in the way that you measure performance.

Andrew: You get it, man. that was a perfect description of it. Yeah, that is exactly it. It’s just reframing what you already do. So instead of, I talk about in the playbook we created, instead of thinking periodically, you think continuously. So instead of, we need to run a program to develop this skill because we had engagement surveys to show whatever. And then you do that and then you’ve got the skill improvement. You’ve got good satisfaction results and then you try and show causation to some business projects, right?

That’s typically how it’s done. Whereas this is a way more continuous thing where you’re saying, what already matters. You know, the example you just brought out was awesome. Do you want to play out that example for people listening to see exactly how this works in practice?

Making Learning Work at Scale

Nolan: Yeah. So, if there is one thing I’m thinking of, Andrew, and we’ve never attempted this, and it’s new for you. So, you might not have the answer, but how do you do this at a scale? I’m kind of like, I can see at an individual level almost and when we implemented it, we had a concept that we took to market and we got some legs, but it, didn’t quite get there. But so, I’d love to hear.

How, I mean, you mentioned, and maybe you’re not doing it at scale, maybe that’s the point. Maybe the role is to make learning and L&D much more micro. But, so how are you doing this at these large, you mentioned earlier the names of these companies, these are household companies. How are you doing it with such big companies?

Andrew: Yeah. Well, I think maybe you missed my question there. But that I want to answer this question. with, this example first, because you, you shared an example about building a, I forget exactly what you said, but you had, like, there was the marketing team had to build a customer list and then ICP and stuff.

Worked Example: Building an ICP

Andrew: So, like, let’s just play that out and then we can talk about the scale thing of it. Because I think that’s a really good framing of an example. So, if that’s the case, what I’m advocating for is saying, okay. So, they’re going to go out and develop this ICP and then, you know, that we’re going to know whether they’re successful or not if we find the people that are interested and end up buying this new thing. Right. So, then you, basically, you get it. You go into performance consulting mode, right? You figure out like, so what are they going to need to do well to develop an ICP? Well, there’s probably some like interviews that they’re going to need to run.

So, what I shared that comes up a lot, asking better questions, right? getting to the, getting to, we teach this tool called narrative dialogue, right? So, like, you give them a framework and a skillset for that component of it. Then they go and conduct all these interviews, they’re going to need to make sense of that, right? They’re going to need to develop a point of view. So, we go and teach them consulting topics MECE and pyramid principles. So, they now have this way to structure their thinking. And then, they’re need to go pitch this internally first, right? We talked about influencing without authority. So, let’s teach them some skills of how to adapt your communication to an executive audience, to your cross-functional peers, whatever the case is. So, you see what I mean? You kind of break it down into these behaviors and then teach those.

Skills, Jobs, and AI Mapping

Nolan: Yeah, it, well, and it fits really well into the need of the hour, which is this idea of a job-based organization and a role-based organization. And, and that’s a big advocate of what OKRs is really, they were very, very early on in this idea that what matters is the skill. It doesn’t matter the job. It’s like the collection of these skills will help you reach these things. Because a lot of OKRs are cross, cross-functional.

And so, it’s interesting you say that because what we tried to do and we have a new launch coming out that might be able to do it is we were not able at scale to say, we’re launching this product. Nolan needs to create an ideal customer profile. That’s what ICP stands for. And you mentioned you broke it into, well, the job is creating the ideal customer profile. The skill needed is market research or asking good questions. That’s the skill is communication or asking good questions.

So, but then how does Nolan, Nolan might not recognize that, right? Nolan just used a job; Nolan doesn’t see the skill. And so, where we tried to, or we’re in this latest launch where we’re trying to push this is can AI interpret what the OKR is and translate that to a nearest skill of somebody. And then offer them up, here’s, I see.

One of the OKRs is to create an ICP, which, we know based off of the structure that that’s going to require asking good communication skills. Okay, let’s do two things. One, let’s first measure how good Nolan has done at this job before.

Maybe he’s already, maybe he’s a 10 out of 10. That skill is already high, high, high. So, I don’t actually need to give him that. But if it’s not, if it’s a zero for like, well, Nolan does a lot of things well that he’s going to need to do this. Of the skills that he needs to do this job this time, one we want to press is this other is just this one. So, that’s how we were trying to do it. Again, the first iteration was a very heavy manual input.

First, have Nolan have the self-realization to go choose his own skills that are needed. Then the second was have the manager do it. But where we’re landing on now is the AI recommend, but human has to verify. Some platforms, Eightfold is focused heavily into the AI. Take the wheel. GLOTE and the others are kind of going that way.

And maybe that’s what ends up working, but for us, we feel at this point in time, the best way to do it is to have AI give you that recommendation, but then have the human, Nolan’s manager or whoever, Nolan himself, maybe even say, okay, I can sign off that this is a skill Nolan needs. Because, I don’t know, unless you have this platform, how are you able to, you know, so we talked about Nolan, right?

So, Nolan is one person in the function but now there’s 10-12 other people in the function attached to this one job that, you know, launching this new cloud product. Are you, in practice, are you seeing one L&D person is a kind of attached to this OKR? As you said, as a performance consultant and working with everybody. So, we talked marketing, but you can’t go, can’t, it’s be very hard. Why they not pissing the people? or maybe they’re working with finance, maybe they’re working with whoever else. Is that how you’re seeing it play out or have you not got into to that next level?

Andrew: Are you saying the L&D person? The experiences we’ve had with it is that the L&D people, the L&D teams we work with tend to prioritize manager development. So, they were totally focused on that. And so this was, especially with this one client, a very forward-thinking client saying, we also need to think about this IC population. So, can you come in and run that for us? And so, what they’ve done is just pulled, they’ve been the selection mechanism for the 25 people that go through our cohorts. We’ve done five of them now. So, they’re identifying the 25 people each time to go through. Does that answer that question?

Nolan: Yes, it does. So, at that 25, so let’s assume you’re now trying to do this for 125. What would the structure, if I’m an L&D person now, I’m nodding my head, I’m saying, Andrew is super smart, I’m tracking, I want to do this, but I want to do it across 125 people. Is it like a, how do you structure yourself in a way to do this?

Andrew: Yeah. So, this gets to the scale question that you, so this is great. And now that people have got a picture of what this looks like, you’ve identified these three things, and this is, so we’re going to get these 25 people skilled up in those three skills, and they’re going to be working on that OKR. My argument, first of all, is thinking about scale first is one part of the equation, and it’s but, it’s often the only thing people think about.

Floor vs. Ceiling: What to Scale

Andrew: So, I have this concept of, there’s a floor that you need to raise when you’re running an L&D function and then There’s a ceiling. There’s floor raising stuff is super important. Onboarding is a great example of floor raising. Everyone needs a certain level of understanding to be able to ramp. And so, there’s good floor, manager development as well can also be some floor raising stuff, like, we need them to give better feedback, right?

But like to really move the needle, even in that feedback example, to raise the ceiling, in other words, for people, you can’t give them generic training. You can’t solve a thousand people’s problems. You’ve got to solve; to raise the ceiling, you’ve got to solve individual people’s problems. And the best way we found to do that is through cohorts, because of going back to that example as well you shared.

So, Nolan might be good at asking questions. So yeah, I like the idea of using AI as like a, is a selection part of the selection criteria. But, I think another thing is what we found is that it’s having Nolan in a cohort of people that are threes and fours out of 10 on that can actually be like, it’s a good learning experience for the threes and fours, obviously, but can be really good learning experience for Nolan, who’s a 10 out 10 already, because he becomes a mentor basically for people in the cohort, right?

I’m huge believer in just cohort learning and the peer-to-peer aspect of it and you are always learning even if you are one step above someone on the on the ladder when they’re asking you questions from that one step below you become De facto the best teacher they could have right way better than someone who’s like all the way at the very top and so because you know what their context is, you know what they’ve been through and so and the process of teaching is one of the best ways to learn, so that’s also an argument to say just bring people in of varying skill sets and have them all learning together.

Six-to-Eight Week Sprint Model

Andrew: So, now getting to the scale question, focus on these 25 person sprints at a given time. Pick an OKR, two or three OKRs maybe, build that cohort, run a six, these are typically six to eight weeks. You can, you know, I mentioned three topics. You could do them in six weeks, two weeks each, and then we sometimes add on a seven and eighth week as an onboarding and graduation. Okay, so that’s six to eight weeks.

You run the sprint; you get people screwed up in this thing. Now, you can run that same sprint over and over again. It’s awesome. Or it’s very easy to plug and play that format and just start to change the skills out. All right. So, now maybe it’s not asking good questions. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, maybe that just needs to focus on communication. And so, you know, you, just tweak it based on that. And what you’ll find again is like people start to go through these things.

You can get, you typically run them like four times a year, maybe more, that’s 100 people a year, and you start to build up a community of alumni now as well. And so, you can leverage them in that, you think micro with the sprints, but then you can also think of this as a full-on program, and what do you do with these people who are now going through these sprints, learning in the flow of work, right? And how are they, like, teaching each other, and how are you leveraging the bright spots of the 10 out of 10s who are really good at the different skills?

Nolan: And so, when a company is looking to invest in this, right, I mentioned invest because they’re spending money, especially if they’re working with you, they’re paying somebody outside of their company to do this for them. How are you? Are you, so the key results, which I can is similar to a KPI. Some of those are probably not financial, right? It’s not always when a five-million-dollar contract or whatever, right? It’s hey, I got a 95% completion rate or whatever it should be.

What Counts as “Value” in L&D

Nolan: How are you showing value? Is it literally, is it just taking the key results and saying, hey, these key results are enough or are you trying to say these key results have a financial value attached to them and you’re working with your clients to attach a financial value to the key results as well.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s a good question. This is where people can get stuck is trying to quantify the ROI. And I think that’s a call it an ROI playbook. I don’t truly believe you can count. You can estimate a decent proxy for ROI, especially if you also haven’t even talked about retention. That’s a huge benefit of running programs this as well. So, that’s another thing you should throw in the mix. But, I can share a little bit about the measurement dashboard recommend and see if this answers your question and how.

Four-Part Measurement Dashboard

Andrew: And pick holes in this as well, right? Because I want to see how it survives the light of day. What I’m saying is if what the OKR is, what the key results are, that the business has already said is important. So that it could be customer related, it could be revenue related, it could be like adoption rates for a product or a new, it could be an internal initiative. It’s we want to hit a certain adoption rate for a new tool internally, right? So, these are all things that will impact the business in a positive way.

There are four other things you can look at before that, that then help you tell a story of contribution. And those four things are first of all, just straight up pre and post. So, self-assessments, right? Like what are, what are people saying they are getting better at? So, skill growth, right? The next thing is an independent third-party perspective on that. So, we go and interview their managers and or survey their managers. Has this person’s behavior changed in these dimensions?

So, now you’ve got that perspective. The third is examples of real-world application. So, what, and this is my favorite part, you interview all the participants, we told you this framework for interviewing and asking better questions. How have you used that? And then you get these stories of like, I was on this customer call and I was like, I use how, what questions and I just got a whole another perspective on that client and it led to that. And you get these nuanced detailed stories.

So, now you’ve got this bulletproof business case here that you are impacting on the actual project that you picked. The fourth thing is the network that we talked about. So, how many of these people came into the cohorts? How many do now? And any CEO and CFO and anybody in the C-suite knows if more of our people are interacting and understanding each other and building trust with each other.

They’re going to work better together. So now you’ve got this skill growth, managers confirming that, actual examples of it being applied on the project and their networks are expanding, the overall network’s expanding. How could you not be contributing to that OKR?

Nolan: So, that’s good, I liked that. I’m new to this idea that it doesn’t have to be a dollar necessarily, right? So, this guy, I don’t know if Dr. Keith Keating wrote this book called ‘Hidden Values.’ And I was just interviewing him and he had said, you the CFOs believe it or not, don’t just want to know money. They want to know the story. They truly do. They want to know, because they’re smart people.

There was this company, the startup, it was an ingenious idea. He found the correlation between when somebody leaves an organization, what they found that it can be a catalyst for many others. And so, what this company did, this is a tangent, but what this company did is they said, if Nolan leaves, we will send a note to HR about who Nolan was closest with at the company, because studies show those are the most likely to leave. Now, if we take a look at the inverse of that and we say, especially if we’re talking a high performer individual contributor here, there’s tremendous value tied up in these people. And expanding that network of like, who they know, is great, great value. I think, so, I like the idea actually.

I’m coming around on this idea. But, I would prefer to say, sure, great. But what is that? What value could you possibly attribute to this network of 10 people sticking along, right? Well, if we just take the average attrition, is 20 percent. If we cut that back, if we save one person’s salary, we’re going to save a hundred grand.

This program cost me whatever, you know what I mean? So, I’m tempted to want to, but the two things, one, I’m starting to feel the stories are important, but two, there’s also just the natural. It can just be as simple as if it is OKR, it is a value to the company. If you’re able to accomplish the OKR, it therefore is valuable or else it wouldn’t have been an OKR in the first place.

Don’t Over-Instrument; Show Direction

Andrew: It’s you’ve hit the nail on the head yet because I had the same impulse, right? I was like, we have to try and measure this. How do we measure this? So, then we went down this rabbit hole. So, this is the stuff we found out. Going back to this original, genesis was like, remember it was about decisions, slowing down meetings about meetings and all that stuff.

So, if we’re giving people better tools for understanding each other, better tools for developing a point of view and better tools for communicating, we’re going to be speeding up that process. So, let’s go and find, this is how crazy we were thinking. First of all, how long has it taken you to, we did this with the interviews, how long is it a decision previously and how long has it taken you now?

People have no idea, how do you measure that, right? But they know that it’s improving, but it’s another example, someone said to us, you know, we would usually have these slack threads of 80 messages back and forth. No one was getting assigned taking ownership and just a setting direction and now with this whole brain thinking model thing that you taught us I’m able to get that done in you know, like, a third of the time or whatever, you know, and so like okay cool. So, now could we go and measure how slack threads how much they have compressed, you know, so before you yeah, like that you’re creating so much extra like friction and baggage for people if you try and measure that stuff.

And so, I was just, do we even need to know that precisely? Like, could we not just build a case that says all five of these things are moving in the direction and they’re all interrelated? Like, how could you make an argument that is not improving.

Nolan: And so therefore at a macro level, it’s what is the percentage of the key results scores before versus after? Assuming again, going back to the very beginning, if you assume that the objective is business aligned, which it has to be, or else it wouldn’t be an objective, or else there’s nobody to blame but the person who set that objective. Nobody’s going to come back to L&D and say that. So, that’s its own thing, which happens more often than you would think, but that’s okay.

So, then the key results are to have these three measurements. I do think it’s as simple to say, we influence these three things and, what is the baseline score of a key result that’s not attached? The great thing about those that aren’t deep into OKRs, the way a lot of orgs structure it, a lot of way that simple OKRs are set up is, if you have three different key results attached to this one thing, one big project, they got three things. You usually, you know, and everything is a zero to a hundred percent done. And so, you have an aggregate score of this objective. It’s not necessarily always the same, but you can say what percentage complete did they get?

So, it doesn’t necessarily always need to be, well, last month or last quarter I was measuring, an OKR that was focused on sales. This time it’s the same people, but they’re focused more on project management. It doesn’t matter because it’s all focused on, well, if this was important and these were the metrics, they were defined, that should work. Over simplification, one thing I want to pick your brain on, because I thought I was very adamant about this, but it took a lot of reworks to do. So, the market will tell us if they like it or not.

If you, it’s easy when things are going well, it’s great. Winning solves everything. Show me any sports team who’s winning, who doesn’t have a great company, a great culture, great ticket sales, great advertising dollars, and then also don’t show me a company who never wins who’s got those things as well. So, winning solves everything, but a lot of times we’re going to lose. So, take a look at the same example of Nolan. And this is where I, sometimes OKRs are connected to individual performance, right? Some people believe they should. Some people are very adamant that they should not at all be connected to performance management, but let’s assume they are. Or even they’re not for that matter.

A big problem of a manager is if I’m if I sit down at the end of the quarter and I’m looking at my team. And I see oh shit, you know Andrew really. He only did 10 % of this, this of his key results attached to this objective. Aside from saying, I wish you would have done better. I don’t know how to help Andrew except for invest a ton of my time. And because we know that’s how we know we can move the needle the most is if I sit down with Andrew and help him do the job, work with him, mentor him, coach him. That’s the only path that I know.

And so, what we’re going to launch is if the OKRs are below a certain percentage, that instantly triggers a manager to review. And when the manager comes and looks at Andrew, the manager is going to get a report that says, okay, these are the skills that probably contributed to Andrew not doing too good. We would recommend you put him in these four programs. Do you agree or do you not agree?

So, it allowed L&D to work at a very micro level to create job roles, not just based off what Andrew thinks is important, but what his manager views is important. And you’ve cut back this feedback loop of, you know, what is the organization’s top 10 metrics and what skills are we going to push this quarter versus next quarter? What do you think of that? You know, again, good performance, we’re all happy, we’re all good.

But, when people don’t perform, that opens a big avenue to coach. Because the opposite of this is, well, if I don’t do something and Andrew underperforms again, is that Andrew’s fault? We’ve seen he can’t do the job, but we just keep giving him the job. If we haven’t changed anything, Andrew’s looking for another job. He’s like, I can’t do the job. They’re not helping me do the job. I’m out.

Accountability and Performance Management

Andrew: So, what you’re getting at, I mean, two thoughts. One, it helps the scale piece of this because you’re pushing that decision point to the managers and so they can help triage and sort of help find the right people, get them in the right programs, that kind of thing.

I think another part of it is like, what you’re getting at is sort of there’s a performance management aspect to this to say, like, we’ve already done the work of diagnosing what the, the constituent parts of this performance look like. And then we’ve got programs that can help improve them. My thought goes that you have a way to hold people accountable now, it’s like, all right, you have got to go and develop this and you can then start to learn on some of those other things pre-imposed self-assessments.

Are you getting better at this? What does your manager say about that? They become a key part of this. And so, yeah, I didn’t think about it that, but that’s an interesting use case for this type of approach.

Empower Managers; Short Feedback Loops

Nolan: Because I’ve always felt that that’s where I mean, it’s one of those interesting things where L&D has an impossible job. Be everything for everyone. Be the marketing consultant. Be the sales consultant. Be the project management consultant. Be the compliance consultant. And so, you know, me and L&D, I go to the head of marketing and I tell them what skills they need. Yeah, ok. They’re not, you don’t know what you’re talking about here. So, the biggest thing was like a way to empower the person who doesn’t know anything about learning. They don’t know learning.

So, we’re going to simplify it and allow L&D to then take the lead once they get that input, right? Now, I’m getting rich feedback of exactly what I need to deliver to my workforce. And I’m getting it at the end of every cycle. Since it’s attached to an objective, I know the company values it.

So where, I doubt, I know this is a very, as we started with, OKRs themselves are a very nuanced conversation. Anytime we’re talking about performance and measurement within L&D, there’s a lot of nuances and there’s not exactly way to do it. It was a sound advice you said of, if you just look to make something perfect, you’ll just never do something. Sometimes progress over perfection is what you need here. And so, if you’re listening and you’re thinking this just seems too complicated, we’re talking a lot about a lot of different edge cases.

There is so much progress, the smallest progress is huge in terms of the results that it can have on performance. So, don’t let any of these edge cases scare you away. Get started, do something, try to connect one, attach yourself to one objective in an organization, one OKR, if you have OKRs, attach yourself, talk to somebody that owns it and ask them, how can I support you with this and see what happens?

The OKR–L&D Playbook: What’s Inside

Nolan: So, one thing I want to do is simplify that. But the other thing I want to bring up Andrew, so in your post that I referenced at the beginning, you were giving away a tool to help people. Tell us a little bit about what that is and where they can get that tool.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s a playbook for this, right? So, it’s like a lot of just step by step explanation of what this is. And then a bunch of examples of, from real clients we’ve worked on and then a fictitious example to illustrate it as we walk through it. But I will say as we, as I, as the post started to gain traction, I went and started to put a lot more effort into that playbook. Because I was like, people really want this thing.

So, what started as probably four or five pages of something pretty decent to follow I was like I needed to wrap this thing up. I said it out to some people I trust and they gave me some good feedback and I just beefed that thing up. So, it’s now 14 pages and it’s solid and that they’ve helped me improve it a lot and it’s now a lot more valuable, but again, it’s a starting point.

I think you make a good point there. It’s when you put this playbook into play and it’s like a game, in football or whatever, Match Day, it’s very different. Someone hits you in the face and it’s like, so that’s going to happen and you just have to trust the process and trust that you know how to do this. You’re in L&D, you’re in it for the reasons and it allows you to do what you do really well, which is help people reach their potential.

And so, I think if you focus on that, you will, when we first did this with this client, we got a negative NPS on the first time we ran it. Like, I just want to say that to people that you might not get this right the first time you do it. That client trusted the process. They gave us a chance and they said, look, if you can turn it around in this cohort, so we had two more chances for that, you know, we’ll keep going with this. And we did that, but when it meets the light of day, you’re going to get pushback. You’re going to get and just trust the process, go back to the basics in that playbook and repeat. It’s an iterative process.

Nolan: Very good advice. And where do they get the playbook again?

Andrew: Yeah, it’s currently we’re pushing it out on LinkedIn. So, folks want to, I think you put my LinkedIn in the show notes or something. If folks want to click on that, they just send me a DM, tell me you want the playbook and we’ll get it over to you.

Closing Thoughts

Nolan: Wonderful, for those listening, it’s Andrew Barry, Barry like, the name, not the fruit, B-A-R-R-Y, and Curious Lion is the company. So, type in Andrew, Curious Lion, you’ll find it. If not, we’ll have it everywhere for you to click and download. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for giving us time. You know, this is Friday at 4.30 PM, your time, I think, you’re in East Coast. So, I just want to, I always to let my listeners know when somebody has stayed on a Friday afternoon to talk with us. I feel you should get extra bonus points for that. So, thank you for joining us and thank you for joining us on a Friday afternoon at that.

Andrew: Yeah man. Thanks for having me and I enjoyed this conversation.

Nolan: Thank you, bye.