Treasure 27 – Goals and Books

Nugget #1 is another text from Förster & Kreuz, who I featured in Treasure 23 – Change, Marketing, Performance already. They collected five attributes of their most horrible workday. During the holidays many people will reflect on 2017 and derive some personal goals for next year. Often we have a hard time defining what they are.  I think it is very easy to say, what it shouldn’t look like. For me a horrible workday would be administrational tasks only and filling giant excel sheets. So just look back to 2017 and you can easily spot the horrible workdays and identify five attributes. Also I fully agree to their closing comments. You have enough creative leeway to change it!
FINGER WEG! DER ALPTRAUM EINES ARBEITSTAGES (4 mins, text, German)

Nugget #2 is from Veronika Goncalves. She demystifies one of the big hype topics around goal setting and performance management: OKR. I’ve touched OKR on this blog a couple of times, but never had a detailed review of it. I fully agree to Veronika that OKR is just a tool, nothing more. It is not a silver bullet. Just because Google does it, it doesn’t mean you’ll become as successful as Google by using it.  I also agree that this is not a top-down priority-rollout-tool. Where I don’t agree is that you shouldn’t set a goal that feels uncomfortable and unreachable. I do this for myself and don’t feel this invites me to underachieve.
WHY OKRS ARE NOT DELIVERING THE RESULT EXECUTIVE MANAGERS EXPECT (8 mins, text, English)

Nugget #3 is a nice article from Hailley Griffis at Buffer. She shows how Buffer is encouraging their employees to read and self-improve. Even if you don’t buy books for your employees, you can create a space for discussing books and let leaders share books they read and their learnings. This is definitely something for my creative backlog at work. Buffer also shares their 13 most read books in 2017. So if you don’t know yet what to read during the holidays, here you go:
3 Ways We’re Encouraging Employees To Read More, Plus The Top 13 Books We’re Reading in 2017 (5 mins, text, English)

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!