Three Secrets of High Performance Team (2)-Establishing Task-oriented Organization

In the first article, we revealed the first secret of high-performance team-open and transparent communication culture. Next, we should let this precious communication culture drive the execution of enterprises. To this end, I chose a unique attribute: "Task Organization". It is similar to "a flat, neutral and borderless organization". However, the definition of "task-based organization" clarifies the purpose of flat organization, not for anything else, but to complete the key "tasks" of enterprises in a minimalist organizational form.

As mentioned in the first article, the purpose of this series of articles is not only to talk about the benefits of transparent and flat management, but to provide specific guidelines for entrepreneurs' actions. Therefore, I will guide managers to successfully establish a task-oriented organization and shape a team culture that appreciates actions and results at several levels.

When it comes to tasks, it's easy to think of GTD (getting things done, a personal time management method invented by David Allen). The idea of task management based on GTD is also widely accepted in business circles, and many bosses spend a lot of energy to help employees master this set of methods and tools. But in fact, GTD requires very high self-discipline. According to statistics, only 6% of people in the workplace can establish and maintain GTD habits. If we rely on the self-discipline of employees to establish a task-based organization, we will be very lucky to succeed.

In the concept of open communication, we recognize and explore the shining side of human nature, and in task management, we find and accept a weakness of human nature-laziness.

Enterprise tasks cannot be simply assigned to individual tasks, and then rely on people's consciousness. We can't imagine that people are perfect, and we can't imagine relying on individual self-discipline to complete heavy task inspection, evaluation and summary. Spontaneous behavior is certainly valuable, but it is difficult to sustain and repeat. Therefore, before talking about task-based organizations, let's make it clear that the enterprise task system is a closed-loop collaborative process, with a task initiator, a single person in charge (possibly the initiator himself), members involved in implementation, clear deadlines and completion standards, all of which are the elements of enterprise tasks. In addition to these static elements, a complete task closed loop may also include interim progress check, task result check, defect attribution analysis and task effectiveness evaluation. Simply put, in addition to initiating, tasks need to be checked and evaluated. The results of unchecked tasks are not much different from those of a single GTD.

In the process of changing the traditional management concept to flattening, this concept of closed-loop management of tasks is often easily overlooked. Many managers want to know why spontaneity cannot solve the problem of execution. To deeply analyze this problem, we may need the wisdom of social psychologists, but from the practice of enterprise management, we have observed three basic facts:

First of all, spontaneous creative impulse from free space, instant effect, sudden inspiration, and organizations that continue to promote innovation can also make such effects appear repeatedly like pulses. But this has nothing to do with the need for lasting implementation, because the implementation of a task requires long-term continuous efforts, and it is difficult to create too much pleasure by working repeatedly on an existing project for a period of time, and most people will unconsciously avoid it. This is why the task has been delayed for a long time.

Secondly, an open communication environment can stimulate more ideas. If we can't realize the difficulty of closed-loop task, too many ideas can easily be integrated into the execution system, which will lead to the team being overloaded and out of focus, but accomplish nothing.

Thirdly, when personal tasks are put into enterprise tasks, most enterprise tasks are accomplished through human sociality (altruism, dependence, collaboration and consciousness).

What tasks should a task-oriented organization initiate and complete? Or, what tasks can we focus the team's energy on to help the enterprise succeed? Develop this or that function? Call 50 clients this week? "Recruit a sales director"? Maybe both, maybe none. The key to forming a task-oriented organization is to establish a set of "strategy-goal-task system", which is deeply rooted in people's hearts and helps managers at all levels to acquire relevant capabilities.

In the difficult course of starting a business, all tasks should be traced back to the strategic vision. The common source of tasks in enterprises is only short-term performance goals, and even the decomposed tasks are still split performance goals. For example, the revenue of 30 million yuan was completed this quarter, and it was split into three business units, one of which was 6,543,800 yuan. This task system of blindly cutting pizza is absolutely impossible to help enterprises succeed.

Among all kinds of "strategy-goal-task" system tools, OKR (goal and key result) is the most popular tool for start-ups. In fact, it is also completely applicable to mature enterprises. From 1970 s to now, Intel has been applying OKR to manage goals and tasks, and companies such as Google, Facebook and Linkedin have continuously used OKR over 18. Next, I will take OKR as an example to introduce how a typical enterprise establishes a "strategy-goal-task" system.

(1) Starting from the strategy

It is really not easy to determine today's task from a strategic perspective. This is why startups need to constantly describe their vision in the early and difficult process of trial and error. Vision makes the uncertain future more concrete and tangible.

Strategic vision helps enterprises to describe what they are trying to achieve in 5- 10 years, outline the possible market picture, and even use quantitative indicators to help determine the facts. The "initial heart" that entrepreneurs often say often echoes the vision. Since it is the beginning, there is no need to stick to the existing resources, no money, no financing, no one, recruitment. Anyway, there will be 5- 10 years to bridge the gap between reality and ideal. In the process of determining the vision, the imagination and market foresight of entrepreneurs play a major role. Of course, at the very least, you should ensure that this vision is technically feasible.

For example, Ming Dow outlined a very clear strategic vision: within 5-6 years, it will provide cloud collaboration software services for more than 1 10,000 enterprises in China, so that small and medium-sized enterprises can reach the level of informatization comparable to large enterprises at a lower cost. Through decentralized product design concept, it will promote flat direct cooperation inside and outside enterprises and promote the development of software ecology of Internet enterprises through an open platform.

In this vision description, we set specific targets for 6,543,800 small and medium-sized enterprises to use Ming Dow. At the same time, it also provides constraints: "low price" and "driving flat organization", with "openness and ecology" as the strategic goal. When the vision is so specific, it can be used to reverse the path from never to today. Suppose we want to achieve this goal in six years, what should we achieve in the fifth year? The fourth year, the third year ... Or in the process of achieving the goal of 1 10,000, in which years should the milestone goals of 500,000, 1 10,000 and 1 10,000 be achieved respectively? In order to realize the open platform ecology, how to determine the development goal of enterprise application market?

Above, this is how the annual goal pushed to the past year came from. How to do this process? I think it mainly depends on the founder and the founding team, because they are the most direct descriptors of the vision and the helmsman of the whole process. Their experience and intuition can make goal setting more objective, and their persistence and enthusiasm can also make goal setting necessary and challenging.

The next process, which is also the most critical step in the OKR method, is to implement the annual target at the quarterly OKR meeting in the implementation system. Only in this process can strategy and execution be truly linked, and top managers and team members can be linked.

2) quarterly OKR meeting

High performance comes from frequent planning, execution and evaluation cycles. The OKR method needs to be iterated at least quarterly. Before the start of each quarter, the management and professional backbone will determine the company's OKR for the next quarter through the OKR meeting.

Because they are called "goals and key results" and will be iterated by high frequency, the number of OKRs determined every quarter is very limited, and they must be critical and important. In other words, OKR will not cover all the tasks of the enterprise, let alone the daily tasks that have clearly entered the operation mode.

Determining OKR is the specific choice of every enterprise, and it is rarely possible to cross-reference each other, let alone rely on the so-called industry best practice library. Every choice must be decided by CEO and participants through careful strategic analysis. Nevertheless, I can still provide some basic ideas according to several typical enterprise stages.

Usually, start-ups focus on two intertwined themes: survival and trial and error. Some decisions are the key actions to ensure survival, while others use limited resources to speed up the pace of trial and error and improve the success rate. Growth enterprises clearly focus on eliminating growth constraints (such as product reliability) and enhancing growth momentum (such as sales channel construction); Enterprises from maturity to recession should explore more opportunities to improve efficiency. For the sake of simplicity, I have omitted the goal of seeking new growth points for enterprises at this stage, because this cycle can refer to start-ups

Through the 1-2-day meeting, the team will list dozens of key achievements around several goals. For these key results, we need to use the SMART principle to find the metrics. This indicator should be completely quantified. For example, a key achievement of a quarter is to improve the stickiness of mobile apps. We can choose the 30-day retention rate as an indicator to improve it, so it can be expressed as "increasing the 30-day retention rate of mobile apps by 30%". The fuzzy description of key results cannot be evaluated. I know many readers will suddenly think of performance appraisal here, so please don't worry, read on first.

When listing quarterly KR, make sure that KR comes not only from CEO and executives, but also from front-line members close to customers, departments with possible bottlenecks, and professional backbones with know-how. This combination of KR is reasonable enough.

After determining the measurable KR, we should have a project manager behind each KR, who is responsible for coordinating resources and trying to achieve results. If necessary, we can also arrange an executive as a responder for a group of KR, who is responsible for counseling and resource coordination. Someone will ask immediately, will manager KR take this performance indicator and influence salary, bonus and promotion according to the achievement of results? The answer is no, because:

? 1)KR is usually an important and difficult task. Failure to reach the goal of 100% is a high probability event, and we usually require the KR index to be set quite challenging. The completion of KR is usually multifactorial, and 100% does not depend on the efforts of this KR manager. If the performance of KR is directly linked to the economic income of the project manager, 100% will lead to unfairness.

2) Incentive tools such as performance bonus are only suitable for simple and repetitive work. For the nature of work that mainly depends on creativity and synergy, the role of economic incentives is sometimes even negative. (See Dan Pinker's book Driving Force and TED talk)

3) Every cycle, the whole company has only a few kr, so usually only a few project managers are needed to support it. In any enterprise, although it is impossible for everyone to be spontaneous enough, almost all companies can find some motivated employees. This is usually enough for OKR to execute the death penalty. I often make an analogy. Manager KR is like an inspection-free product. Because of their usual behavior, they don't need to impose mechanical performance evaluation in the implementation of KR.

For an effective strategy-goal-task system, it is very important to separate performance appraisal from OKR.

Having said that, we should have an OKR quarterly document at hand, which is usually very concise, usually no more than two pages. The following are some OKR files set by Ming Dow in Q2 on 20 15 (the actual length is about three times of the screenshot), in order to give readers a more vivid and intuitive reference. Returning to the basics should be simple enough, right?

After the OKR is made, the management needs to make it public within the enterprise to ensure that every member can understand the specific content of OKR and what key results each KR manager will work for. How will they break down the difficult KR into effective specific tasks and delegate them to the appropriate task executors?

The open and transparent communication culture I mentioned in my first article will also play a key role at this time. Does the management have the habit of transparent communication, and make good use of open Mic to convey OKR formulation process and decision logic to all employees? Can employees raise questions and objections about problematic OKR settings? Can the opposition get a response from the management? Can the whole process be transparent enough?

During the implementation cycle of a quarter, can manager KR and relevant executors inform the progress, next plan and problems in a timely and proactive manner?

The answers to these questions determine whether the team can produce high performance.

3) Evaluation and re-quotation

We mentioned earlier that the formulation of OKR is decoupled from performance appraisal, but this does not mean that the results of OKR do not need to be evaluated. In fact, enterprises using OKR not only keep the frequency of quarterly iteration, but also improve the achievement rate through monthly evaluation or mid-term evaluation. The mid-term evaluation will find those KR who are particularly backward in progress, and get close to the goal by adjusting their working methods and efforts.

A more comprehensive assessment and recovery will be conducted at the next OKR quarterly meeting.

A quarter has passed. First of all, each KR can be scored according to the established measurement index. Because the goal has been completely quantified, the score is completely objective. The original growth rate of 30% is actually 2 1%, which is 0.7( 1 is a perfect score). Considering the challenge of KR formula, 0.6-0.8 is a very good result. If the score reaches or exceeds 1, KR is too conservative.

Next, should manager KR report his work? Let him explain why he didn't achieve his goal. Yes, but not exactly. Of course, manager KR should lead the whole resumption, but more sponsors and executives should participate. OKR is definitely not to praise and punish, but to find out the gap between planning and implementation, and the gap between actual planning and optimal planning. We will find unreasonable plans and inadequate implementation. Because it is absolutely objective and frank, there is no need to hang the word reward and punishment at the meeting.

Every quarter's resumption will find the imperfections in the formulation and implementation of OKR, which is the beauty of OKR. With the completion of each quarter, we will be more or less close to the annual target, the bottleneck of growth will be gradually eliminated, and the growth factors will be strengthened item by item. Although the possibility of reversing part of KR in individual quarters is not ruled out, the continuous implementation of OKR is a powerful means to ensure the improvement of performance.

During the journey of OKR, the team not only experienced the effective promotion of affairs, but also gradually formed a good team culture. Because the formation of cultural values is driven by consistent behavior, nothing is more in line with this behavioral trait than OKR execution. After doing OKR to a certain stage, most team members will believe that there is a certain success model. At this point, you can confidently say that we have become a task-oriented organization.

In the third part of this series, I will also talk about the characteristics of members in task-based organizations, how to treat performance appraisal and how the traditional organizational structure will continue to exist. Before, please allow me to briefly summarize several key points of task-based organizations:

1) Why is there a task? Because one of the weaknesses of human nature-inertia. When personal task management is upgraded to enterprise task management, human sociality will give us great help.

2) The key of task organization is to establish a strategy-goal-task system. OKR is a typical tool of this type.

3) Proceed from the strategy, promote the annual goal, formulate and re-launch OKR through quarterly OKR meetings, and achieve the final goal through repeated iterations.

4) 4) The setting of OKR is separated from performance appraisal, and only a few KR managers can undertake limited key result tasks. The process of doing OKR together is also a process of improving team members and shaping unified cultural values.

Among the secret trilogy of high-performance teams, this one is the longest. These methods and experiences come not only from myself, but also from my teammates who have been with me for many years and their days and nights for countless tasks. I think there must be many business managers among you and your friends who are overwhelmed by heavy tasks every day, so moving your fingers and sharing them with your friends may give them some inspiration on the road of management progress.

At this point, you can understand that my goal is to write happily, KR 100 likes, 100 forwards. :-)

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