By Andreas Pettersson, Founder, Leaders ADAPT
You download an OKR template on a Sunday. By Tuesday your leadership team has 11 objectives and 38 key results. By week five, nobody opens the sheet. By the end of the quarter, the review is a list of reasons.
The template did not fail. The number did.
This page gives you 25 OKR examples a leadership team can adapt, the CEO's own set of three, and the honest rule for when 90 day Rocks work better than OKRs. It belongs to our operating cadence guide. I have run the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), OKRs and Scaling Up, at Arcules on the way to 150 people and today at Leaders ADAPT.
Quick answer: Good OKR examples for a leadership team pair one plain objective with two to four measurable key results that describe outcomes, not activities. Example: objective, make cash predictable. Key results: a 13 week cash forecast within 5 percent of actual, days sales outstanding under 45, no month below the agreed cash floor. Keep the team to three objectives or fewer per quarter.
How do you write OKRs a leadership team will actually use?
An OKR is a goal written as one qualitative objective plus two to four measurable key results that together prove the objective was met.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) grew out of Intel's management practice and spread through the technology industry. The format is simple.
Knowing how to write OKRs is where teams go wrong. These four rules come straight from coaching calls with CEOs and leadership teams this year.
- An outcome is not an activity. An executive I coach listed "publishing rhythm" as a goal. Anyone can publish something once a week and call it a rhythm. The outcome was a pipeline of future funders. That is the key result.
- Ask "for the sake of what?" Every objective should survive that question twice. If it does not, you have found a task.
- Define done to the dollar. In the bank, committed, invoiced and promised are four different numbers. Pick one, in writing, before the quarter starts.
- One owner per key result. Shared ownership is no ownership. The 5 Minute Leader puts it in three words: co-ownership is non-ownership.
If your team still argues about whether something is a goal format question, our guide to company goals covers the SMART structure. This page is about the leadership table.
Leaders ADAPT is independent of every framework and software vendor named here. We are not affiliated with, certified by or endorsed by EOS Worldwide, the owner of EOS, or by Scaling Up, Pinnacle Business Guides, FranklinCovey or any OKR software company. The names describe methods, and the examples below are our own.
What are good OKR examples by function?
These are leadership OKR examples written to be copied and edited. Replace the numbers with your own baselines. Each row is one objective with two key results. That makes 25 OKR examples for leadership, grouped by function.
| # | Function | Objective | Key results |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sales | Make revenue predictable | Forecast within 10 percent of actual, pipeline at 3x quarterly target |
| 2 | Sales | Win bigger accounts | Average deal size up 20 percent, three new accounts above the top tier |
| 3 | Sales | Shorten the sales cycle | Median days to close down 15, no deal older than 120 days in pipeline |
| 4 | Marketing | Fill the pipeline without paid media | 40 qualified leads from organic, cost per lead down 25 percent |
| 5 | Marketing | Own one category search | Top 3 for two buyer terms, 10 new referring domains |
| 6 | Marketing | Turn customers into proof | Six published case studies, two with a number the customer approved |
| 7 | Operations | Deliver on time, every time | On time delivery at 95 percent, rework under 3 percent |
| 8 | Operations | Document how we run | 20 core processes written and followed, audit pass on 18 |
| 9 | Operations | Remove the founder from daily approvals | Zero approvals needing the CEO, decision rights written for every leader |
| 10 | Finance | Make cash predictable | 13 week forecast within 5 percent, days sales outstanding under 45 |
| 11 | Finance | Protect margin | Gross margin at plan, variable cost growth below revenue growth |
| 12 | Finance | Close the books faster | Month end close in 5 working days, zero restatements |
| 13 | People | Hire the right people faster | Time to hire under 35 days, 90 day retention at 100 percent |
| 14 | People | Put every seat in the right hands | Every seat with one named owner, wrong seat decisions made within 30 days |
| 15 | People | Grow the next layer of leaders | Two managers running the weekly meeting, 1:1s held at 90 percent |
| 16 | Product | Ship what customers pay for | Two releases tied to top renewal requests, adoption of each above 40 percent |
| 17 | Product | Cut time to value | New customer live in 14 days, first value event in week one |
| 18 | Product | Reduce support load | Tickets per customer down 30 percent, top five causes fixed |
| 19 | Customer success | Keep the customers we have | Gross retention at 95 percent, every at risk account with a save plan |
| 20 | Customer success | Grow inside accounts | Net revenue retention at 110 percent, 10 expansion deals |
| 21 | Customer success | Hear problems earlier | Health score on every account, response to red accounts within 48 hours |
| 22 | Leadership team | Run a meeting that decides things | Weekly meeting held 13 of 13 weeks, top issues solved inside two weeks |
| 23 | Leadership team | Make the plan real | All quarterly priorities with one owner, 80 percent completed |
| 24 | AI adoption | Give every leader back time | Two recurring reports fully automated, hours saved logged by each leader |
| 25 | AI adoption | Adopt AI without losing control | Validation checklist on every AI workflow, one owner per workflow |
Notice what is missing. No "launch the new website". No "run a campaign".
Those are projects. They may be the right projects, but they sit under a key result, not in place of one.
What should a CEO's OKR set look like?
The CEO's OKRs are not the sum of the leaders' OKRs. They are the three things only the CEO can be accountable for.
The strongest CEO OKRs I have seen this year came from an executive stepping into the top job at a mission driven organization. We put the priorities in a specific order.
Fund the short term gap. Deliver on what was promised to the people the organization serves. Lay the foundation for the future.
If the first works, it enables the second. Delivering the second gives you the story that makes the third possible.
Written as OKRs, with roles and targets made generic:
| Objective | Key results |
|---|---|
| Secure the next 12 months | Funding target received in the bank, not promised, by a set date. Monthly burn at or below plan. Board informed in writing before each major change. |
| Deliver what we promised | Current cohort delivered on schedule. Participant outcome measure at target. No commitment to a partner missed. |
| Lay the foundation | A named pipeline of qualified future funders, reviewed monthly. One public proof point per month. |
One more pattern from coaching calls. When a leader asked how a quarterly priority relates to the yearly revenue number, my answer was to flip it around.
The yearly target is a scorecard number. The quarterly priority should drive a substantial share of it. If you pick two priorities, state what each is supposed to drive in revenue. Then you know the definition of success before the quarter starts.
How many OKRs should a leadership team run?
Fewer than you want.
I am absolutely on board with Rocks, and the same count applies to OKRs. A huge failure, in my experience, is when an organization sets 10 Rocks and then fails at all of them. We were most successful at Arcules with between one and three per quarter, and the same is true at Leaders ADAPT now.
Get as close as you can to one company wide objective. Everything else is either a subdivision of it or preparation for a future quarter's objective. Every person carries at most one supporting priority.
A leadership team I sat with set six new quarterly Rocks while a couple from the previous quarter were still open. They rightly agreed not to add more. Nobody said the real total out loud. Say it out loud.
When do Rocks beat OKRs, and when do OKRs win?
Rocks beat OKRs when the company is under about 100 people and the leadership team is the management layer. A Rock is one owner, one quarter, done or not done. There is nowhere to hide and nothing to grade.
OKRs win on measurement. Key results make you think about how you will know, which is why I push 90 day targets and still borrow OKR thinking for the measures. OKRs also allow stretch, where a 70 percent result can be a good quarter.
My honest criticism of EOS here: I am not sure you need to be as hardcore with Rocks as it asks. OKRs are nicer on this point, and you should be able to change things in between.
I once felt that the only reason an implementer wanted us to stick rigidly to quarterly targets was that it made their calendar easy, so they could show up every third month. Real business situations happened, and we had to pivot. The plan should serve the business, not the facilitator's schedule.
If you are still deciding whether EOS itself is right for you, start with my independent EOS review. The full comparison of the two systems is in EOS vs OKRs, and the quarterly session that sets them is in our quarterly planning guide.
Why do OKRs fail in companies under 100 people, and do small businesses need them?
OKRs for small business fail for predictable reasons. Here is why OKRs fail, in the order I see it:
- Too many, set in a single enthusiastic afternoon.
- Activities written as key results.
- Cascaded to every employee before the company has basic KPIs on a weekly scorecard.
- Reviewed at the end of the quarter instead of every week.
- Stretch targets set, then missed stretch treated as failure.
Do small businesses need OKRs at all? Not first. They need a scorecard of leading indicators and one to three priorities a quarter. OKRs are a layer on top.
What about OKR coaching? An outside coach can shorten the first two quarters. If the coach is not working, cut them and move on to the next one. The same rule I give CEOs about implementers.
Where AI fits with OKRs, and what stays human
OKR software is an obvious home for AI. It can draft key results from an objective, flag any key result that describes an activity, collect weekly status from owners, and summarise which results are drifting.
Ownership of that rollout matters. The CEO has to own AI the same way the CEO owns the operating system, with the Integrator fully bought in. AI is a cultural change, and if you have one person sandbagging it, it is never going anywhere.
What stays human in OKRs:
- People decisions behind every owner
- Issue solving judgment on drifting results
- Accountability consequences for missed results
- Strategic commitments in the objectives themselves
- Performance conversations about stretch versus failure
- External promises made on the back of a target
The reasons are in what not to delegate to AI. For AI across the whole operating system, see AI for companies running EOS.
What an OKR set does not fix
OKRs describe where to go. They say nothing about how a leader delegates, gives feedback or holds a peer to account.
I do not believe that the system should mold the leader. The leader should be able to cope regardless of the framework. A team that cannot have a hard conversation will write beautiful key results and miss them politely.
That work lives outside the goal sheet, and our leadership team development guide is where it starts.
Common questions about OKR examples
What are good OKR examples for a leadership team?
Good leadership OKR examples pair one plain language objective with two to four measurable results. For example, the objective make cash predictable, with key results such as a 13 week cash forecast within an agreed margin of actual, a lower days sales outstanding figure, and no month below the cash floor. Each key result describes an outcome, not an activity.
What should a CEO's OKRs look like?
A CEO's OKRs usually cover three things: keeping the company funded or profitable in the short term, delivering what the company has promised to customers, and building the foundation for the next stage. Each objective has two or three key results with a clear definition of done, such as money received in the bank rather than promised.
How many OKRs should a leadership team have?
Most leadership teams do better with one to three objectives per quarter, each with two to four key results. Companies that set ten or more priorities in a quarter tend to spread effort thin and finish few of them. One company wide objective, with each leader owning a supporting result, keeps the team aligned.
What is the difference between OKRs and Rocks?
OKRs pair an objective with graded key results and often include stretch targets. Rocks, from the Entrepreneurial Operating System, are a small number of 90 day priorities, each with one owner, judged as done or not done. Rocks favour focus and simplicity, while OKRs favour measurement and ambition. Some companies use Rocks with OKR style measures.
Why do OKRs fail in small companies?
OKRs often fail in small companies because the team sets too many, writes activities instead of outcomes, cascades them before basic performance numbers exist, and reviews them only at the end of the quarter. Without a weekly check in and a named owner for each key result, the OKRs become a document rather than a management tool.
Do you need an OKR coach to implement OKRs?
No, but an outside coach can shorten the first two quarters by keeping objectives few and key results measurable, and by challenging leaders who write activities. A coach is most useful when the leadership team has tried OKRs before and stalled. If a coach is not improving the results after a quarter or two, it is reasonable to change coach.
Your next question
- OKR vs KPI: which your leadership team needs first
- The weekly business review that tracks your key results
- 1:1 advisory on the CEO's own OKR set
Take the 25 OKR examples above and count your current objectives. Is the number one to three, or is it eleven? Reply and tell me.
What it is: 1:1 advisory with Andreas Pettersson, an operator who has run EOS, OKRs and Scaling Up, to write the CEO's own objectives and cut the leadership team's list to the few that matter. Who it is for: CEOs of 20 to 200 person companies whose goal sheet is longer than their quarter. Explore 1:1 CEO advisory
