As a manager of a team in Koan, you have a major opportunity to leverage the work that your reports are doing to help the entire team see value in goals and reflections. With the right prompts and effective usage of the data your team is providing, you can make your team more aligned and keep your goals on track to success. We’ve put together some tips for leading your team with Koan below.

Filling out reflections is a quick and easy way for your team to keep their key results updated, but it should feel like more than just filling out a form that no one reads. Taking time to engage with your team’s reflections, by commenting and reacting to them, can make sure that your team understands that they’re filling out their reflection for a reason. Reflections also give you a great place to highlight your team’s work or help them solicit help for their goals. Read our article on reflections here and on giving feedback here.

You can use Koan (both reflections, comments, and private notes) to organize your thoughts for 1:1s with your team. Reflections surface where they may need help and you can refer to their reflection and ask for more details, creating a natural conversation flow.

We encourage every team to carve out 15 minutes at the end of the week dedicated to filling out reflections. Taking time to think about what was accomplished and what your team’s priorities are for the week ahead can help focus the work that’s being done and give your team a better jumping off point for connecting their efforts. But writing reflections is only half of the process. Taking a few minutes at the start of your staff meeting to allow everyone to read each other's reflections is a great way to signal the importance of them and the value they bring and make sure that everyone is starting your team meeting with as much information about what’s going on as possible.

Koan gives you the option to look at your key results as individual projects, focusing on the work that needs to be done outside of the context of the overall objective. This helps your team focus on what they can do in the near term to keep your goals on track. Koan has features that can help, like our table view and presentation mode, to more easily go through your key results with your team.

As you close your goals for the quarter, you’ll have a dedicated place to talk about what went well, what your team learned, or anything else that helps you wrap the quarter. This is a great place to call out the hard work your team members did and celebrate together. Make sure to add in your accomplishments in the TL;DR section. More details on closing your goals are available here.

Reflections create a repository of historic information that can be helpful in remembering all of the work you and your team have done when it comes time to make note of such accomplishments, for reviews, etc. Though, resist tying goals to performance management (read more here).