Your individual OKR should always be aligned with the team OKR (or the OKR that is one level-up). In other words, the completion of your individual Key Results should bring the team OKR one step forward.
One of the questions that we got is what to do when an individual wants to work on a KR that is not aligned with any of the team KR.
That scenario is possible to happen. There are 3 assumptions as to why it happens and what to do about it:
- There’s room for improvement for the team OKR; meaning that there should have been an additional KR to accommodate what the individual wants to do. If that’s the case, then the manager should be aware of the issue and propose a change in the team OKR to the Management Team.
- What the individual wants to do is not aligned with her team OKR but to the another team OKR in the company. For example, an individual in the Business Development Team has a Key Result that’s aligned with the Operations OKR. This can be one of the examples for cross-alignment across teams. In that case, she can still record it as a KR on her Business Development OKR Dashboard, but she needs to write down that her KR is aligned with one of the KRs from the Operations Team.
- What the individual wants to do is actually a task; not a KR. Thus, she needs to record that activity as a task on her OKR dashboard.
