How to Set OKRs With Your Team, Not For Them
It's tempting, especially under time pressure, for a manager to draft the team's OKRs alone and present them at the next meeting. It's faster, it avoids a messy group discussion, and the resulting goals often look perfectly reasonable on paper. The problem shows up later: a team that didn't help set a goal rarely feels responsible for hitting it. Ownership isn't something you can hand someone along with the finished document. It has to be built in from the start. SHRM's reporting on collaborative goal setting makes the same point: goals employees help shape get stronger buy-in than goals handed down.
Why Top-Down OKRs Underperform
When a manager writes the Key Results and simply distributes them, the team's role shrinks to execution and reporting. That's not nothing, but it's a much weaker form of engagement than genuinely believing in the goal. People are far more likely to push through a hard stretch, to flag a problem early, or to think creatively about how to hit a target, when they had a hand in setting it. Top-down goals tend to produce compliance: the update gets filled in on time, but the thinking behind hitting the target isn't really happening.
A Practical Process for Co-Creating OKRs
Collaborative doesn't mean unstructured. A clear process actually makes co-creation faster, not slower, because it gives the discussion a shape instead of leaving it open-ended.
- Start with company or department direction, not a blank page. The team shouldn't be guessing what matters. Share the higher-level Objective or priority first, so the team's own OKRs have something real to align to.
- Ask the team to draft Objectives before you do. Give the team the direction and ask them to come back with what they think the priority should be for their part of it, following a process close to Google re:Work's guide to setting goals with OKRs. You'll often find they land close to what you had in mind, and when they don't, that gap is worth a conversation.
- Workshop the Key Results together. This is where a manager's experience is most useful, not in dictating the number, but in pressure-testing it. Ask "how would we know this actually happened?" until the Key Result is specific and measurable.
- Negotiate ambition openly. If a proposed Key Result feels too safe, say so and ask what a more ambitious version would look like. If it feels unrealistic, ask what would need to be true for it to be achievable. This should be a conversation, not a unilateral edit after the meeting.
- Confirm ownership out loud. Before finalizing, ask each person directly whether they're comfortable being responsible for their piece. A quiet nod in a meeting isn't the same as a real yes, and it's worth the extra ten seconds to check.
Leave Room for the Team's Own Priorities
Alignment to company direction doesn't mean every Key Result has to be reverse-engineered from the top. Teams often see problems and opportunities leadership doesn't have visibility into. Leaving space for one Objective that comes primarily from the team's own judgment, not just from what cascaded down, reinforces that this is genuinely a shared process, not top-down goals with a participatory veneer.
Watch for Fake Collaboration
A common failure mode is a manager who runs a discussion, but has already decided the outcome and steers the conversation until the team lands where the manager wanted anyway. Teams notice this quickly, and it damages trust in the process faster than skipping the discussion entirely would have. If you're going to ask for input, be genuinely open to it changing the outcome. If a decision truly isn't up for discussion, say so plainly instead of running a fake workshop around it.
Make the Process Sustainable, Not Just the First Time
A collaborative goal-setting session is easy to pull off once, with enthusiasm, at the start of a new initiative. The real test is whether it happens again next quarter, and the quarter after that. Keeping the process light, a focused hour rather than a full-day workshop, and using a tool that makes drafting and revising OKRs together simple rather than clunky, makes it far more likely the collaborative habit survives past the first cycle. This is part of why Easy OKR is built to be simple enough for a team to draft and adjust OKRs together in a single sitting, without needing a facilitator or a training session first.