Introduction

There's a parable about three bricklayers that has always captured the importance of purpose-driven work for me.

A man walking down the street sees three bricklayers. Each of them is diligently placing bricks along a wall, and each of them is working very hard.

To the first bricklayer, the man asks the question, "What are you doing?" The bricklayer replies, "I am laying bricks. I am working hard to feed my family."

The man moves to the second bricklayer and asks the same question,"What are you doing?" to which the second bricklayer replies, "I'm building this nice, big wall."

Finally, the man comes to the third bricklayer, who is the most focused, and asks again, "What are you doing?" The third one has a gleam in his eye and says, "I'm building a great cathedral."

The fact is, most employees don't know why they're doing the work they do; they just work on what their manager tells them to or what some project management tool lists as the next task for them.

When every team and person in your organization is aligned to the strategic priorities of the business and understands the purpose behind their work, they are highly engaged, productive, and happy. It's true when building cathedrals, and it's true in business.

Businesses today face constant disruption and uncertainty-whether due to technical disruptions, market changes, financial conditions, war, or pandemics upending whole industries. These businesses need a new framework to move the business forward, pivot when necessary, and empower their teams.

When teams understand the "why" of a company's objectives, they intuitively recognize concepts and plans more concretely, and will be able to flag risks, changes needed, and opportunities that may have been missed otherwise.

By focusing on what matters in the midst of the daily whirlwind of activity, your teams stay in the "flow" and are highly productive. Purpose and alignment bring your teams together and foster collaboration.

The leadership challenge is how to bring purpose to the work everyone is doing, so everyone in the organization understands that they are building a cathedral and not just coming to work every day to lay bricks one at a time.

I've seen thousands of businesses drive alignment, purpose, and focus and increase business resilience and growth by leveraging the goal methodology of objectives and key results (OKRs). In the following pages, you'll learn how this can be accomplished for you and your business as well.

Why Now?

In March of 2020, COVID-19 tore across the globe and upended life as we knew it. Like most business leaders, I closed my company's office and sent the team to work from home, unsure of when we'd come back or what the pandemic meant for our business's future (at least those of us fortunate enough to work in industries where we could do so). At the time, we hoped it would be only a few weeks. Then, a few weeks turned into our new normal. Our entire way of working changed.

While the shift to hybrid and remote work appears to have happened in blink of an eye, the shift has been underway for years. Over the past decade, more and more employees have opted for flexible work arrangements and work hours, and more and more employers have started to embrace this change. Business leaders have been under steadily growing pressure to show success faster and, as our teams move to distributed models, the old systems that worked in-office are creating bottlenecks and leading to a lack of alignment. Talent has become harder to attract and retain than ever. COVID-19 exacerbated these changes, but it did so more quickly than any of us could have imagined.

Businesses are under ever-increasing pressure to quickly adapt to these shifts, while continuing to keep every employee focused, motivated, and driving business outcomes.

I'm excited to share how OKRs can add value to every single employee in your organization and accelerate the business.

My company, Ally.io, which has since been acquired by Microsoft, builds OKR software. This framework has been central to how we operate our business, providing the foundation for every discussion and initiative. In March of 2020, as we all scrambled to make sense of the external factors changing our lives, OKRs helped ground the entire team to our most important work and, more importantly, to the outcomes we needed to drive.

More important than my own experience in using OKRs to grow multiple businesses, my team and I have helped thousands of teams do the same, using OKRs and our software. From large enterprises to startups, technology to manufacturing, media to healthcare, and operations and HR to engineering and sales, I have seen OKRs make an impact in every type of business and function.

Throughout this most recent period of change, and others before it, the OKR framework has been the key to resilience for so many businesses, mine included. It has given us the ability to continue to scale as we moved out of the initial system shock and into the new normal.

Most industries have moved to a global, distributed, and sometimes asynchronous workforce. This phenomenon, coupled with a growing tech stack to accommodate it and increased urgency around the pace of innovation and growth, has led to the need for visibility, alignment, and employee engagement across businesses that are becoming more and more complex.

Our businesses are dealing with an urgent need for speed and agility at scale. All while the increase in remote and distributed work has brought new challenges including the impact this hybrid environment has had on our personal lives. Four key themes have emerged more prominently in this hybrid world:

1. A lack of alignment is creating bottlenecks: In many cases, managers and teams aren't aware of what other departments are working on, whether they're focused on the same initiatives, or whether their own group is working on the right initiatives or driving toward the right outcomes. This lack of structure is exacerbated by processes that often rely on a single person or single point of failure. Without the alignment needed to move quickly and in synch, the business can slow to a crawl, create customer-facing problems, or have teams doing duplicate work.
2. The need for growth and resilience are more daunting than ever: Almost half (48%) of executives say that the biggest risk to their business achieving its growth targets.1 The expectations investors and shareholders have for exponential growth are higher than ever, and the competitive landscape is exploding, regardless of industry or vertical. In fact, 2021 ended with over 832 "unicorn" companies (privately held businesses valued at over $1 billion).2 In 2015, unicorns numbered fewer than 80. This pressure falls squarely on the shoulders of the leadership team. In 2021, we saw record CEO turnover, nearly double that of 2018.3
3. The Great Resignation: Employees are leaving their jobs en masse because they are not connected to the company's purpose. In short, they do not feel like their work matters, and role switching takes less of an emotional toll when they don't find that connection around a proverbial water cooler. According to a 2022 Microsoft Worklab report,4 43% of the global workforce is considering a job change. Employees aren't connecting face-to-face like they used to. There's no break room, no ping-pong table, no coffeepot to stand around and gossip. Company culture in 2022 comes from a sense of purpose. Employees want to feel connected to the company's mission and vision, they want to know that they're doing work that contributes to that mission, and they want to trust that the work they're doing is the right work.
4. Visibility is more difficult, and silos have emerged: As a business leader, you need line-of-sight into the focus areas and work being done across the company and the ability to click deeper to understand a trend, growth opportunity, or risk to the business. On the other side of that coin, your employees need to experience transparency from you that is not as natural as it may have been in-office. Future Forum finds that employees who feel like their leadership team is transparent are twice as likely to feel confident about their company's future.5

In the end, it all comes down to a relentless focus on that purpose and making it central to every part of the business.

Creating Purpose-Driven Work for Every Employee

Perhaps my favorite part of the bricklayer parable is that it's rooted in the true story of the famous architect Christopher Wren, who was commissioned to rebuild St. Paul's Cathedral after the great London fire of 1666. Wren understood that truly executing on something amazing takes everyone working toward the same vision and took it upon himself to ensure that the people working on St. Paul's understood that vision.

This is where two critical challenges come into play when thinking about business execution and translating strategy into actual productivity:

1. Many leaders assume their team automatically has the context of what they're building, and automatically sees why their work matters or fits into the overall mission. That context is actually lost quickly when...