What makes a great leader? When Chris Hadfield was commanding the International Space Station, he learned that it’s not about seeking out individual greatness to make yourself look good. Instead, he found that excellent leadership is about building up the people around you: trusting them, empowering them, and ultimately, enabling them to contribute their expertise so that the team can become more than the sum of its parts.

OKRs can be a powerful tool in an organization’s arsenal for creating alignment, focusing on outcomes instead of just effort or task completions, and surfacing the right operational priorities. They’re just as powerful within departments and teams, and it’s in this latter area that project managers often start to get involved in the OKR process. But what about using OKRs within the project management discipline?

No marketer is an island. Having a great team of people on your side is one of the most important things you can do to set your business up for marketing success, but to maximize your team’s efficiency, you need to make sure everyone is on the same page. This is especially significant because today’s marketing teams have to juggle many moving parts.

Growth doesn’t happen by accident. It takes careful planning, the right opportunities, and the right goals. Growth also requires effective systems for setting those goals and tracking progress. After all, what use is a goal if you don’t know when or if you reached it?

Teams work better when they talk to each other and collaborate, but you don’t need us to tell you that. Connecting the dots between effective team communication and high-performance teams or agencies is where things get interesting. Poor team communication isn't just unproductive. It can create stress and waste valuable time — everything top performers avoid. Many teams may think they’ve got effective communication when it may not be that great.

How do you align your entire organization around specific company goals? And what’s the right way to motivate team members to improve employee performance and team cohesion? Goal-setting is an important strategy: Your company and its teams need to know the what. But as important as goal setting is, it’s only part of the equation.

Some days you might think you need a crystal ball to forecast your agency’s future. What lies ahead? How many people will I need on new accounts? How much money will we need to make in order to meet our bottom line? We’re here to tell you what you actually need is better resource management.

Modern business marketing is awash in initiatives, processes, data, and metrics — from referral traffic to new visitors on the website to an alphabet soup of KPIs, there’s a lot to keep track of. And that’s before we start doing any of the actual work of marketing! Marketing OKRs (we know, yet another acronym!) are one way to cut through the noise and align your marketing efforts around something coherent and achievable.

Looking for a treasure trove of OKR examples? We've assembled 20 road-tested OKRs that can inspire you as you implement an OKR framework within your business. Over several recent posts, we’ve covered the OKR framework in a detailed way. So in this post, we won’t spend much time at all talking about what OKRs are or why to use them.

Your project may seem to be moving along smoothly. However, the project execution phase is where the rubber meets the road. Want to know if all of your meticulous project planning actually paid off? At this stage of the project management lifecycle, you’ll find out quickly if your meticulous project planning will pay off. The problem? Execution is arguably the trickiest phase of the project lifecycle. No matter which project methodology is used, this is where many teams totally drop the ball.