OKR Template for Teams
Three documents and three sheets that cascade every submitted team goal against the company's stated objectives, and flag the ones that map to nothing.
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This pack cascades every submitted team goal against the company's stated objectives before anyone runs a check-in. A goal maps to an objective only if its wording supports the claim. It does not map because the owning team usually works in that area. A goal that connects to nothing gets marked UNMAPPED rather than counted as strategic by default. In the worked example, Marloe Logistics submitted 24 goals across 6 teams against 5 stated objectives. Twenty mapped somewhere. Four mapped to nothing at all.
The finding that matters is what happens to those four goals at the midpoint. By week 6 of a 13-week cycle, 15 of 24 goals had a logged check-in and 9 had none. Three of the four unmapped goals sat inside that group of nine. An orphan goal here was two and a half times more likely to go quiet by week 6 than a goal tied to an objective, 75 percent against 30 percent. An untethered goal is not just off-strategy. It is also the one nobody is checking on.
Every goal is also scored against two tests before it counts as active: does it name a real measure, and does it have one accountable owner instead of a team. A goal can pass the cascade and still fail both, and each is flagged on its own. Gallup has found only 30 percent of employees strongly agree their manager involves them in goal setting (Gallup), which the cascade map is built to fix. Check-ins run on the cadence a performance cycle tracks, and the same cadence is what a 1:1 is built to log.
What is in the pack
Goal Register
One row per goal with the owning team, the individual owner and the exact wording, so the measure and the objective claim are both checkable against what was actually submitted.
Cascade Map
Every stated company objective with the count and share of goals mapped to it, plus an UNMAPPED row that is never quietly folded into the nearest plausible category.
Progress Tracker
Check-in status at each scheduled point in the cycle, so a goal that has gone quiet is visible at the midpoint rather than discovered at the retrospective.
Goal Setting Guide
The three things a goal needs before it counts as active: a real measure, one accountable owner, and an honest objective mapping or an honest admission it has none.
Quality Criteria
Two independent tests applied to every goal regardless of whether it maps to the plan, because a well-aimed goal nobody can measure is still not a goal anyone can check in on.
Check-in Format
What a check-in has to say, so 'no movement, still blocked on the same thing' is logged rather than skipped for having no good news.
One rule every prompt reads first
An orphan goal gets flagged, never deleted or hidden, because a goal quietly dropped from the register is a worse outcome than one marked unmapped and left for a manager to judge.
How it works
- 1
Send the company plan and submitted goals
The stated objectives for this cycle, in whatever form you have them, plus every team's goals as submitted.
- 2
Get the Cascade Map
Each goal checked against the plan's actual wording, with an honest UNMAPPED count rather than a forced match to the nearest objective.
- 3
See the quality flags
Every goal scored against the measure test and the owner test, independent of whether it mapped to anything.
- 4
Track check-ins through the cycle
Log updates as they come in, and see which goals have gone quiet well before the review, cross-referenced against which of those are also unmapped.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a goal mapping to an objective?
The goal's own wording has to support the claim. 'Close 2 target accounts in the cold-chain vertical' maps to 'expand into two new verticals' because the goal names the vertical. A goal from the same team that does not mention it does not map, regardless of what the team generally works on.
Is an unmapped goal a bad goal?
Not automatically. The Goal Setting Guide treats unmapped as one of three legitimate answers alongside upkeep and a leftover from a prior cycle. What it is not allowed to be is invisible: in the worked example 4 of 24 goals were unmapped, and a manager reviewing the register sees that count rather than a register that quietly implies everything connects.
Why check in on a goal that is going well anyway?
Because a goal with zero logged check-ins looks identical whether it is quietly on track or quietly abandoned. In the worked example, unmapped goals were two and a half times more likely to sit in that group. Three of 4 unmapped goals had zero check-ins by week 6, against 6 of 20 mapped goals: 75 percent against 30 percent.
Does a goal have to pass the quality criteria to stay on the register?
No. Failing a test gets flagged, not deleted. A goal that names no measure and has no single owner is still tracked, so the gap is visible to whoever reviews the cycle rather than silently dropped from the count.
How is this different from the OKR software we already have?
Most OKR software gives a team a form to fill in and a dashboard to view it on. None of them read your company plan and check the wording of what was submitted against it. The cascade and the orphan count only exist once someone actually does that comparison, which is the step a data-entry tool has no way to perform.
How does this connect to performance reviews?
The Goal Register is the same record a performance cycle reads when a manager writes a review, and calibration checks whether a rating names an outcome that traces back to a goal. A goal with a real measure and a logged history of check-ins is the evidence a review needs.
What happens when a goal is missed repeatedly rather than just unmapped?
That is a different problem with its own pack. A goal missed once is a check-in note. A pattern of missed, unmeasured goals is what an underperformance case checks against the same kind of dated record this register already keeps.
Find out how many of this quarter's goals actually connect to the plan
Send the company plan and every team's submitted goals. The first thing back is the cascade map, the unmapped count, and which of those orphan goals have already gone quiet.
Cascade my team's goals