OKRs vs KPIs: Why Confusing Them Kills Your Goals

Are KPIs Sabotaging Your OKRs? This Episode Will Change How You Measure Success

Gino Marckx and Wayne Hetherington tackle the most common question from their OKR courses: "What's the difference between OKRs and KPIs?" The answer reveals why mixing them up is deflating your goals and confusing your teams.

The Problem: Teams with good intentions want to measure progress, so they put KPIs into their OKRs. Everything's on one dashboard—efficient, right? Wrong.

The Unintended Consequence: Using maintenance metrics (KPIs) to track transformational goals (OKRs) turns ambitious objectives into ordinary tasks. Your GPS becomes a dashboard, and your team loses sight of where they're going.

Key Insights:

• OKRs are temporary and directional—they end when you reach your goal
• KPIs are permanent system health monitors—they never stop
• The same number can mean different things depending on why you're measuring it
• KPIs don't enable autonomous decision-making toward future goals
• Exception: Transform an unhealthy KPI into a temporary OKR when you need to fix it

Wayne's car metaphor makes it click: Your GPS tells you where to turn (OKRs), your dashboard tells you to change the oil (KPIs). Both essential, completely different purposes.

Perfect for leaders struggling with goal-setting, team alignment, and making measurements that actually matter.

Got a workplace challenge where good intentions led to bad outcomes? Share it for a future episode!

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