Don't Pursue a Bad Idea to the End: Leadership and OKRs with Christine Sandman Stone

Innovation and the Digital Enterprise

OKRs are easy to set up badly. Christine Sandman Stone, CEO and founder of Deliver at Scale, focuses on this key element for success based on her years leading agile transformations. Beginning with her journey, Christine shares her path to leadership and the critical lessons she’s learned—and shared—along the way.

In this episode, Christine provides a glimpse into her world guiding teams to hone in on their goals. First, she offers her perspective on setting the objective and determining the quantitative measurement of that goal. Then, Christine shares the critical element of measurement periods (90 days!) and how to maintain the right outlook on pursuing these goals.

Christine offers key lessons from her book The Parent Track: Work-Life Balance Hacks to Elevate Your Career and Raise Good Humans on how to continue advancing your career during parenthood. She offers tips (ex. the word “conflict” is your friend) and her experiences that led her to share those lessons. Christine dives into her most recent book that set out to provide tangible resources for new managers: The Modern Management Mentor: Next-Level Tools for New Managers, inspired by the questions she fielded during her own daughter’s promotion.

Later in the conversation, Christine discusses the state of leadership and management training. She endorses the advancement of individual contributors that does not necessarily require managing people and discusses a multi-track approach.

• (01:38) – Introducing Christine Sandman Stone
• (06:18) – OKRs
• (09:35) – Narrowing in on the objective
• (13:14) – 90-day measurements
• (17:45) – The Parent Track
• (23:20) – The Modern Management Mentor
• (27:04) – Leadership development
• (33:31) – Individual contributor growth opportunities

Christine Sandman Stone is the CEO and founder of Deliver at Scale and former Global Head of Product & Engineering, Operations & Strategy at Groupon. She has previously worked with Dell, McDonald’s, and Volkswagen. Christine is the author of The Parent Track and The Modern Management Mentor. She earned her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Miami University and a master’s in management and organizational behavior from Benedictine University.

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Podcast episode production by Dante32.