How to Create Great Goals: Using OKRs to Focus on Impact

Setting goals is easy. Creating goals that actually help teams focus, align, and make progress is much harder. Over the past weeks, I have been asked the same question several times: how do you create great goals?

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I explore this question through a very practical lens, using the OKRs approach (Objectives and Key Results).

Beyond goal-setting as a formality. OKRs are often introduced as a framework or a process to comply with. When that happens, goals quickly become disconnected from real work. In this episode, I take a different approach: starting from impact, not from metrics or activities. Rather than asking "what should we measure?", the real question becomes: what impact do we want to create, for whom, and how will we know if we are making progress?

Using Impact Mapping to create meaningful OKRs. To make this concrete, I use a simple example and the Impact Mapping approach to walk through the process of creating OKRs step by step. We look at how objectives express intent and direction, how key results help teams learn rather than just report, and how to connect daily work to meaningful outcomes. The goal is not to get the wording "right", but to create goals that support better conversations and better decisions.

OKRs as a leadership practice. Used well, OKRs are not a management tool — they are a leadership practice. They help teams clarify what matters now, align without over-controlling, and take responsibility for results rather than tasks.

If you are struggling with vague goals, misalignment, or goal fatigue, this episode is a practical starting point to rethink how you create goals.