Every three months I take a deeper dive into my goals. In this post, I will look briefly at September 2020 and extensively at my performance from July – September 2020.
This post is on the longer side, but if you stick with it you’ll learn a few things about goal setting that you can apply to your life and leadership.
By the way, OKRs are a leader’s secret productivity weapon.
Past dashboard results:
Service
The coaching aspect of what I do grew in Q3 2020. October has seen more growth. In September the mastermind had six open seats. Currently, the mastermind has four open seats and will be considered full this month. To prepare for opening new mastermind cohorts, I will begin forming and training a mastermind coach team in October.
I’d like to add 4 leaders to my edupreneur mastermind and coach one more leader one-on-one.
Platforms
Email. I saw an increase in email subscribers. That tells me the free downloads I am creating are valuable. I made some changes behind the scenes with my email provider in order to deliver a better experience to the BLBS tribe.
Podcast. I turned off a service that recycles content I share on social media and the podcast downloads dropped for two straight months. I am turning that service back on in order to serve and reach more school leaders.
Book Sales. This last month was terrible. Maybe because of the reason I noted above. I never have done paid advertising for the book. I even lowered the price to where it was almost free. That didn’t impact sales at all, so I increased back to normal price.
Website. Organic traffic was up for five of the last six months. I continue to rank for more keywords searched in Google. I am 60% of the way toward my goal.
Productivity
I met the minimum expectation I have set for myself — an 80% completion rate of the most significant tasks. An international move has definitely cost me in terms of productivity.
Q3 2020 OKR Results & Takeaways
Scoring
“The simplest, cleanest way to score an objective is by averaging the percentage of completion rates of its associated results.”
John Doerr in Measure What Matters
Google uses the following scale, so I stole like an artist and used it too:
- ? 0.7 – 1.0 = green (I delivered).
- ? 0.4 – 0.6 = yellow (I made progress, but fell short of completion).
- ? 0.0 – 0.3 = red (I failed to make real progress).
| ? OBJECTIVE 1: HELP MORE SCHOOL LEADERS LEVEL UP [75%] (0.9+0.6+0.5+1.0 = 3/4) |
| KEY RESULTS (Q3 2020) ? Grow school leader mastermind to 60 members by June 30 [0.9] ? Grow “Edupreneur” mastermind to 10 members by June 30 [0.6] ? Add two 1:1 coaching clients [0.5] ? Watch 1-2 videos a week in WBECS [PAUSED] ? Design application system for new mastermind coaches [1.0] |
| ? OBJECTIVE 2: CREATE AMAZING CONTENT [95%] |
| KEY RESULTS (Q3 2020) ? Complete first draft of manuscript [0.9] ? Ship all School Leadership Series episodes [1.0] ? Launch Season 1 Better Leaders Better Schools archive [PAUSED] ? Launch new website [0.9] ? Create BLBS Writing Team [1.0] |
| ? OBJECTIVE 3: INCREASE BRAND AWARENESS [69%] |
| KEY RESULTS (Q3 2020) ? 50K downloads a month for BLBS by Sept 30 [0.7] ? 20K downloads a month for SLS by June 30 [0.9] ? 2500K organic visitors a month to website by Sept 30 [0.5] ? Complete SEO course [PAUSED] ? Fix 25% critical error issues on website [1.0] |
| ? OBJECTIVE 4: NURTURE CREATIVITY [PAUSED] |
| I didn’t do a 5th OKR this past quarter. |
Self-Assessment
In the self-assessment, I give the objective numbers a soul.
| OKR | Progress | Score | Self-assessment |
| Help more leaders level up | 75% | 0.8 | I have seen school leaders mastermind growth in October already so I am confident that it will be full this month. I am excited to turn my focus to creating, training, and nurturing a coaching team. In order to live out my Just Cause to grow, connect, and mentor every innovative school leader who wants to develop their skills, I will need help. I stopped any effort to grow the “edupreneur” or 1:1 coaching clients because of the international move, so I am quite happy with where things are given that reality. |
| Create amazing content | 95% | 1.0 | This has always been a strength. I don’t have trouble thinking of or creating valuable resources. It might be even beneficial to stop tracking this OKR altogether to simplify what I monitor. I am going to build a team to help serve the BLBS tribe at a higher level by incorporating more diverse topics on the blog (more on that below). I handed off the vision for the new website so now I am waiting on my team to launch. We missed our date, but that’s okay because of the move and because I have to focus on writing my mastermind book. |
| Increase brand awareness | 69% | 0.8 | Downloads and website traffic have been increasing. I ran an experiment to turn off some social media marketing that “Recycles” old podcast posts. Downloads did drop so I am turning that service back on in order to reach and serve more leaders. I am also happy with my focus on creating blog content that will drive organic search traffic. I realize that a better way to serve school leaders is by forming a team that has a diverse point of view and publish their ideas from the blog. This is the same strategy that has made the School Leadership Series a success, so I’m looking forward to seeing what will happen here as well. The more I mature in running the operations of Better Leaders Better Schools, the more I realize how much satisfaction I get from amplifying others and helping them get their message out there. |
| Nurture Creativity | NA | NA | I paused nurturing my creativity because of the move. Now that I have my art supplies I can get back to painting and sketching. |
| NA |
Did I accomplish all of my objectives? If so, what contributed to my success?
I delivered on 2-of-3 goals. I know how to get stuff done. Time blocking, ideal weeks, and OKRs work for me. I am proud. to have paused OKRs that weren’t an actual priority during the international move.
If not, what obstacles did I encounter?
The move made it very difficult to get done what I normally can do. And that’s okay. It was a good exercise of “letting go” this quarter.
If I were to rewrite a goal achieved in full, what would I change?
I am going to simplify OKR 2 on creating amazing content to focus on getting the website launched as well as finishing my first draft of a mastermind book.
What have I learned that might alter my approach to the next cycle’s OKRs?
It’s quite hard for me not to complete everything and to not ony consider, but actually let things go. I did that successfully this quarter which also makes me wonder how I might simplify what I am tracking and wanting to accomplish. I’d enjoy preferring less, more meaningful goals this quarter.
