Learn best practices for using Status Hero's Goals and OKRs feature to track longer-term projects and initiatives with your team
Overview
Goals in Status Hero allow your team to track and see progress against projects and initiatives. They are as much about communication as they are about alignment. Most remote and hybrid teams suffer from an “alignment gap” because the tools they currently use do a poor job of keeping teammates focused on the big goal. These tools are too close to the daily work.
This typical “alignment gap” is a source of enormous frustration for so many teams: competing priorities, infighting, disconnection, lack of focus, overly large meetings, and more. Everyone is working feverishly, but it seems like no progress is being made toward the big things that matter to your team. This gap can be excruciating for a leader who has to deliver results.
Goals in Status Hero fill that gap.
.png?width=1120&upscale=true&name=goals-crop-light%20(1).png)
Each Goal exists as sort of a short-lived micro-blog with regular, rich context updates right alongside the Goal. No longer will you get to the end of the quarter only to be reminded of that goal you set at the beginning that you haven’t heard anything about in 90 days.
You’ll go from the present day of having a fuzzy understanding of what your team is doing to a totally new way of working with a living high-level view of what’s going on without the surprises.
Best Practices
The smallest unit of measure should be “project sized”.
Goals are about the big picture over periods of time, not granular tasks. With that in mind, the smallest unit of measure for a goal should be “project-sized”. Keep in mind that every goal assumes that whoever “owns” the goal will provide updates on it. Don’t make a goal for it if you don’t want to report on it! Roll it up with a similar goal into a broader objective instead.
Creating effective Status Hero goals
Goals come in infinite flavors, but you should ask yourself two questions before creating a goal in Status Hero:
- Will this be helpful for me to see every day? Goals in Status Hero show up on your daily check-in sidebar*. Ideally, you want a goal that’ll help you maintain focus on the kind of progress you want to make.
- Do I want to write about this? Remember that goals in Status Hero are essentially short-lived micro-blogs about a particular subject. If you don’t want to write about it or don’t think you’d have anything to say, consider a different goal.
Keep it focused
Goals exist to create focus. Creating too many goals is inherently counterproductive. People should own one to two goals max. It keeps focus high and “alignment effort” low.
Goals are great for team professional development too
No one’s stopping you if you want to make a “Let’s improve our accessibility” goal that you use to share, learn, discuss, and reflect.
Goal owners shouldn’t only be managers
If only a few people own goals, only a few people get heard. When everyone owns a goal, everyone has a dedicated venue to share their work.
Goals are most effective when they’re not handed down
Alignment requires buy-in, and buy-in happens when everyone has a hand in crafting their goals. Consider a cascading approach where the manager/leader sets a top-level goal, and folks underneath create their own goals that support it.
Higher level = lower frequency
Consider longer cadences like bi-weekly or monthly for team goals, and weekly cadence for individual goals. That means whenever it’s time to provide a team goal update, you’re guaranteed to have updates from supporting goals on tap.