Transparency is a key ingredient of trust.

Transparency serves relationships and honours mutual accountability.

Sharing Our Goals

My Grade 5 students discovered this secret.  They each set personalized learning goals and then published them.  They are now inviting accountability and courageously sharing their intentions and their work.

Sharing our goals is a vulnerable and bold promise to ourselves and to each other.

That brings to me to our school-wide transparency.  As a teacher, have you ever wondered, “What does my Principal do all day?”  Or, as a team member, have you ever queried, “Where are we going as an organization?”  As a parent of a school-aged child, have you ever thought, “I have no idea what’s going on in my child’s learning?”

One of our Big Objectives, as a school, is to make thinking and learning visible.  At first, this was more about the students.  However, this objective has expanded in my mind over time.

Our OKR Story

Please allow me to share the story…

At our school, we use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to help us design our annual strategic plan.  We are benefitting from the methodology because it forces us to decide what matters most in our organization and get clear on our priorities.

Daniel Bauer of Better Leaders, Better Schools first introduced me to the concept when he included the book Measure What Matters by John Doerr in our Masterminds group.  Then, we began to explore its power for schools.  You can find a thorough discussion of Danny’s perspective on how this methodology benefits schools in “School Leaders Secret Productivity Weapon.”

In short, I love how Doerr describes OKRs in his book,

“OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured.  Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated.”

We want to be a change-ready school.  Therefore, it’s imperative that we know how to create this social contract within our entire community.

For the last two years, we have defined our school’s Big Objectives annually.  Then, we share the ‘big objectives’ internally with our board of directors, administration, faculty, and team.

Indeed, what Doerr describes happens, this ‘debate’ at the leadership and faculty level to explore how we will begin to achieve what we’ve set out as our objectives.   We continue to improve at our alignment because we’re embedding the big objectives into our meeting agendas and individual work-plans.

My Reflections

Now, as we hit our 1-year anniversary of working the system, I am aware that we are just getting started and learning this process is invigorating.  So, in my work to ‘level up’ our OKR process this year, my next step is to create more school-wide transparency around the process and how it impacts my own work as a leader.

Basically, I want to follow the example of the Fifth Graders.

I am attempting to Model the Way (Kouzes & Posner) and make my leadership thinking and learning visible.

I want to be MORE transparent.

Danny models this incredibly well.  He publishes his results each quarter and takes time to reflect on his work.  You can find his encouragement in a blog post called “How Did You Perform Last Quarter?” 

This Quarter

Here is the vulnerability, I am learning how to write Objectives and Key Results aligned with our School’s Big Objectives.  You get to see my thinking in this process.  And furthermore, I would welcome your feedback!

Our school’s 20-21 Annual Big Objectives are as follows:

You can check out my personal plan for this Quarter (Term) via Asana.

This plan includes my Objectives and Key Results aligned with the school’s Big Objectives.  I am focusing on shaping my Objectives and Key Results for this planning cycle with the following questions:

• Does this work drive results?
• How will I know I’ve completed it?

This is a case where I don’t feel like I’ve mastered planning against these two objectives, but I’m dedicated to the learning process.

Just in case, this entire post seems like a corporate leadership lesson, rather than a focus on students, learning, and schools, please remember…

The students are doing it too.  And, it is all…

For the sake of the children,

Karine

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