 Know your stuff. Make sure you understand and can articulate your strategy and
imperatives for the next 12 to 24 months.
 Focus on the big questions. Make a list of the critical decisions that need to be
made, then segment it into administrative, financial, strategy, customer and
operational categories.
 Prioritize your actions. There are three levels of important activities here: (1) the
board (compensation, audit, regulatory, etc.); (2) strategic/cross-functional initiatives
(e.g., improving time to market, improving order to cash); and (3) functional (grow
sales by X amount, increase Web traffic by Y, improve receivables by Z days, etc).
 Rally the troops. Determine which employees should share specific goals across the
organization based on function and skills. In our experience, creating co-owners of
goals is important as it not only spreads accountability, but it fosters teamwork. To help
with this, TalentCove is a great tool for defining OKRs, particularly for companies with
more than 30 employees.
 Define goals and cascade them down. We suggest following the SMART
principles when creating goals — they’ve been around since November 1981 when
George T. Doran wrote his famous article on the subject in the American Management
Association’s Management Review.
Follow these steps to mobilize teams to meet departmental and
companywide goals . Here are five steps for “governing” effectively:

• Specific: Goals must be clear and unambiguous. When goals are specific, they tell employees
exactly what is expected, when, and how much. Measuring success or failures against goals is
easier when they are specific.
• Measurable: Goals must be measureable so you can constantly judge progress. If your goals
are not measurable, you never know whether your employees are making progress toward their
successful completion.
• Attainable: Goals must be realistic by employees’ standards. We often define a goal in three
buckets — stretch (harder to accomplish, but not impossible), target (reasonable to achieve),
and threshold (below target, but still meaningful value).
• Relevant: Goals must relate directly to your corporate objectives and strategy. Without
relevance, goals are simply interesting activities.
• Time-bound: Goals must have start and end dates. Deadlines and deliverables help
employees to focus their time on completion of the goal.
SMART goals are defined as: