Radical Transparency

What types of metrics do you have to ensure accountability among those on your team to be confident that commitments are indeed being fulfilled? And can you highlight one leadership practice that you have established to hold people accountable on your team?

So it’s a question that I’ve thought quite a lot about because this problem for a company that’s undergoing any sort of change, and Juniper has been on a big transformation journey, in fact, that reinvention journey over the last several years, if you wait for the financial results to tell you whether you’re being successful in that change, it’s way too late. Financial metrics are a lagging indicator. So that’s not a good metric. What you need are almost real time metrics.
So, a few years ago, at Juniper, we implemented a companywide system of OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, sort of a practice that’s been used by several other big forward working companies in the Valley and around the world. And these OKRs are aligned to our true north as a company. For us, it’s about experience first, networking, and it helps me understand if we’re being successful and executing on a strategy. We’re working on our highest priorities, if teams across the company are delivering the results that we need.
And that’s this leads to your question around, how do you ensure accountability? Well, in my opinion, it turns out that the best kind of pressure that you can apply to a system to achieve high accountability is peer pressure. And that’s the beautiful thing about these OKRs, they achieved something that I define as radical transparency, because every objective for every team is available for anybody else to look at, to scrutinize, to ask questions about. And that kind of transparency is absolutely precious, in my view, when it comes to creating the accountability to execute on your strategy.

I like that. That level of transparency. So how do you provide that?

We use a tool, we use a tool that enables us to do just that. It happens to be workboard, in our case, that essentially enables people to create these objectives to tie them to the strategic objectives of the company, to form teams around those objectives. And then to essentially use that tool to update the performance or the results of your achieving relative to those objectives. And I go in there every week, and I take a look across the company about how we’re tracking to the objectives that we’re holding ourselves accountable to.