My own experience with OKR – When we started with OKR, I was skeptical. Another new wave? What a lot of effort! My attitude: I know what I have to do! In the past, I sometimes caught myself losing focus. What was still an A priority in the course of permanent change and what had become even more important in the meantime? Because it wasn’t clear, I sometimes put off important tasks, blanked them out until they caught up with me.
In teams, after reorganizations or other major changes, the sense of “we” is often lost, and communication suffers. In “corona times” and increasingly virtual collaboration with teams distributed across different locations or home offices, collaboration has not become easier either. Some employees have never even seen each other in “real life.” Managers are now required to work with their teams. Often, they consider take only the “hard facts”. Team actions that are fun are often not taken seriously.
But how can you trust someone you only know from work as a colleague? Someone with whom you have never laughed? How to value someone fully if their strengths are not visible? How to foster their potential in the best possible way?
There are many possibilities for developing the personal strengths of individuals. If you want to make a direct and personal contribution as a manager, coaching and mentoring are very suitable and have a proven track record in many organizations and situations. When can you act as a coach? As a coach, you ask many questions and widen perspectives. The coachee (or client) is therefore the person who is enabled by the coaching process to develop their own solutions to their own questions.
I am not Elon Musk. Or more accurately, we are not Elon Musk. That statement is harsh, seeing that a big vision is often only made possible by a big ego. Elon hardly needs real results for that either. He doesn’t need to be a good person or a good leader. He merely needs great ideas that can be combined with strong emotions and linked to a charismatic person, with seemingly unswerving belief in himself and his vision. But I am not Elon Musk. We don’t make promising technologies ourselves. We use them.
