🧭 Alignment check: Are your people ready for the year ahead?

TL;DR

🧭 Alignment check: Are your people ready for the year ahead?

👌 No OKRs? No problem—just answer these 3 questions

❓ Your views on strategy alignment

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Alignment check: Are your people ready for the year ahead?

Imagine this: your favourite football team walks onto the pitch for the championship match. But here’s what you find:

What are their chances of winning?

Even if you’re not a football expert, it’s pretty obvious—the likelihood of winning is close to zero!

You’d probably say, “That’s ridiculous—no team would ever operate like that!”

But now, take a look at another ‘team’: your organisation.

If your organisation’s data shows:

Then that disorganised football team? It might be a mirror image of how your organisation is operating 😱.

Leadership = influencing others to achieve shared goals

You can hire top talent, but without clear alignment, it’s like fielding a team of star players without a game plan.

Without a clear connection between strategy and execution, even the most skilled individuals won’t come together to achieve more than the sum of their parts.

To win the championship—whether on the pitch or in the market—you need alignment, clarity and collaboration.

Ensure you’ve set a clear direction, communicated it effectively and are continuously aligning your team toward that winning goal.

No OKRs? No problem—just answer these 3 questions

“My founders tried OKRs, it didn’t work. Now they don’t want to set any goals.” This is a common frustration I hear from HR leaders and even founders themselves. 

The truth is, when OKRs—or any strategic goal-setting tool—don’t deliver results, the problem isn’t usually with the tool itself but with how it’s being used.

Leadership essentials that OKRs can’t replace

OKRs are a simple tool for providing clarity and helping teams align their efforts toward a common goal. 

However, they are not a replacement for the fundamentals of effective leadership.

🚫 OKRs CANNOT replace prioritisation decisions: OKRs provide focus, not decision-making. They can’t substitute for the hard work of identifying what truly matters.

🚫 OKRs CANNOT replace alignment conversations: OKRs aren’t a substitute for meaningful discussions about priorities. True alignment happens when teams talk, collaborate and share perspectives—not just writing down OKRs in silo.

🚫 OKRs CANNOT give you discipline or productive habits: OKRs don’t replace the need for accountability and habits. Achieving goals requires consistent effort beyond the simple “writing down” of OKRS.

Even if “human error” is the root cause, your founders may now associate OKRs with failure to achieve critical business goals—and have become “allergic” to the framework.

And that’s okay.

3 Questions to solve the real problem: Alignment 

No matter the framework, alignment boils down to answering 3 questions:

1️⃣ Destination – What do we WANT to achieve?

2️⃣ Success measures – How do we KNOW we’ve succeeded?

3️⃣ Steps – What will we DO to get there?

Paths to alignment: Simplify, adapt, or go framework-free

With the 3 questions in mind, as you work to build clarity and alignment, you have a few options in front of you:

💫 Use a different framework: Keep it simple. If OKRs are a no-go, pick a new approach that answers these 3 questions.

🛠️ Fix the missing piece in OKRs: “I” for Initiatives: OKRs often fail without Initiatives—the concrete steps needed to reach your destination. Add them and you might save the framework. (Click here to learn about OKRIs)

⛓️‍💥 Go framework-free: Skip the buzzwords and jargons. Address the 3 questions directly. Your founders don’t care what a framework is called if it delivers results.

Remember: your goal isn’t to make your founders fall back in love with OKRs or any other frameworks. It’s to create clarity, accountability and alignment. Whether you use OKRs, another tool, or no tool at all, this is about business impact—not frameworks.

Get back to first principles (basics). Your company needs alignment, not another tool debate.

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