Google tried individual OKRs, then dropped them. Their own OKR trainer told everyone to skip them altogether.
They got one thing wrong. At Google the individual goal turned into a private task list, sitting off to the side of the company scoreboard. Of course it looked redundant.
Point each one at a company goal instead, as that goal’s early warning signal. Now the individual goal and the company result move together, and nobody can quietly clear their own bar in a year the business misses its plan.
That version is a game changer. Here’s how to write it.
An individual OKR is one objective and two to four key results owned by one person, set annually and reviewed in the monthly check-in with their manager. It works when each key result is an early warning signal for a team or company goal. It fails when it becomes a private task list.
What individual OKRs give people
- Clarity on how you contribute - you can see the line from your week to what the company is measured on. Most people can’t draw that line, and they want to.
- Clarity on what’s expected - one written outcome, agreed with your manager, beats guessing what good looks like. A risk lead I work with called the alternative a melting pot: unclear success, moving goalposts, people under stress.
- Less noise - a goal in writing is something to point at when the next distraction lands on you.
- Ownership of your measures - you decide how you’ll show progress instead of inheriting someone else’s number.
- Credit where it’s hard to see - legal, finance, IT and people teams get to prove their contribution in the same language the commercial teams use.
Where they started
Andy Grove built OKR at Intel in the 1970s, and he built it around individuals first. He called it iMBO, Intel Management by Objectives. By John Doerr’s account, every knowledge worker there wrote their own objectives and key results every month, then pinned them up where anyone walking past could read them.
Doerr’s own goal from 1975, when he was a sales rep at Intel, was to demonstrate the 8080’s superior performance compared to the Motorola 6800. His key results were to deliver five benchmarks, build a demo, write sales training material, and call on three customers.
Read those again. They’re a task list.
The man who took OKR to Google started with a to-do list called a goal. That’s the same trap that got individual OKRs dropped at Google decades later.
What makes them work
Researchers at the Academy of Management tracked real individual goals across a company’s OKR dashboard in 2024. Specific, hard goals lifted performance, no surprise. The amplifier is the interesting part. The lift grew when a person’s goal connected to other people’s goals, and grew again when it sat close to what senior leaders were tracking.
So a goal that visibly ladders up beats an equally hard goal sitting on its own. Connection is the active ingredient, not ambition. That’s the wire Google left out.
I saw that at a client recently. Their chief of marketing runs the only team in the business with individual OKRs. His read is that his people have skin in the game, so they’re the only ones who actually open the data.
At the exec table the debate turned to money, and someone put the risk better than I could. Ask people to eat seven bananas for a hundred dollars and they’ll eat seven bananas. Tie a narrow personal number to pay and you get that number and nothing either side of it.
How to write one
Write the one problem worth solving first, in a sentence or two. What’s broken, who it hurts, what it costs. A goal with no problem underneath it is decoration.
Then one OKR. Two to four key results, and three is the target. Each one is a shift from a starting number to a target number, on something that moves inside the year and tells you early whether a company goal is going to land.
The projects that will move those numbers go in a separate list called initiatives. Not scored, free to change without reopening the goal. Skip it and those projects climb into the key results as tasks in disguise.
Then one test. Could you hit this by simply doing your job as described, with no real judgement from you? If yes, it isn’t yours. Move down a level to the lever that produces the number and measure that.
An example
Placeholder numbers, but this is the shape.
Say you run finance. Problem: the month-end close takes fourteen days, so the leadership team keeps making calls on numbers that are a fortnight old.
Objective: Get the business its numbers while they still matter.
- Reduce the month-end close from 14 days to 4 days
- Reduce material errors in financial inputs from 5% to under 1%
- Increase the share of budget owners submitting on time from 60% to 95%
None of those is a task, and none gets hit by a busy quarter of doing your job.
Annual for individuals, quarterly for teams
Set team OKRs quarterly. Set individual OKRs annually. Grove ran the individual layer monthly at Intel, and the monthly part is the half most people drop.
The two move at different speeds. Team priorities turn over with the quarter. What you’re personally on the hook for shifts far more slowly, so an annual goal survives a reprioritised quarter instead of being rewritten four times a year.
Three forums carry it, and you probably have all three already.
- Monthly check-in with your manager - the goal becomes what the conversation is about.
- Fortnightly confidence score - a number from 0 to 1 on whether you still believe you’ll hit each key result. A drop from 0.8 to 0.5 starts a conversation in week five instead of week eleven.
- Quarterly review - score it, learn from it, adjust.
Write the measures at the 100% level and expect strong performance to land near 80%. A score under 100% is the plan working, not a miss.
Three questions for the monthly check-in
The team member brings the goal and answers. The manager listens, then clears what’s in the way.
- What did you do to move the goal?
- What did you learn?
- What’s your next focus?
Keep it to those three and the meeting stays a conversation instead of a status report.
Individual OKRs and team OKRs
| Team OKR | Individual OKR | |
|---|---|---|
| Who sets it | The team, together | The person, with their manager |
| Cadence | Quarterly | Annual |
| Tied to pay | Never | Only where a company threshold gates it |
| What it measures | An outcome the team can move | What this person adds beyond their role |
Team OKR carries most of the value, so it’s the layer I’d protect first. If you haven’t got team goals running properly yet, start there. I’ve written the whole method up in The ultimate guide to getting started with OKR.
Tips for team members
- Problem first - write down what’s broken and who it hurts before you go near an objective.
- Find what fails without you - name the company goal that stalls if your function underperforms. Answer that and your goal writes itself.
- Outcomes over your to-do list - “run the campaign” is a task. “Lift qualified leads per campaign from 30 to 75” is a goal.
- Make the AI argue with you - draft it with Copilot or Claude, then ask which of these you could hit while your function still underperforms.
Tips for managers
- Negotiate, don’t hand down - a goal someone writes gets owned, and a goal they’re given gets tolerated.
- Hold the line at one - one objective, two to four key results, everything else in the initiatives list.
- Apply the additionality test - could they hit this by just doing the job? Then move down a level to the lever that produces the number.
- Keep pay off narrow personal numbers - weight team and company results. If your plan does carry an individual portion, gate it on a minimum level of company attainment.
Start with your team
You don’t need a programme for this. You need one team and one conversation.
Take your own team. Ask each person to write the problem they’re closest to, in two sentences. Twenty minutes, and step one is done.
Next month, turn the best of those into one objective with three key results. Bring them to your regular check-in and talk about what moved. That’s it running.
Inside a quarter you’ll know whether the conversations got better, and that’s the only evidence worth having.
One thing to hold on to while you do it. Google’s version was a private task list. Make yours the early warning system for a goal the company already cares about.
If you want a hand with the first ones, book a free strategy call and we’ll write one together.
