Meet Manulife
Manulife is a global insurance and financial services company with around 40,000 employees. The OKR Institute worked with Manulife's regional sales teams to help them draft and run Objectives and Key Results, and to connect their regional goals to the strategy set at headquarters. The aim was to bring regional and central goals into one line, lift performance, and make sure local effort added up to something bigger for the company as a whole.
Sales teams move fast and live by their numbers, so any goal-setting approach had to help them sell, not slow them down.
Bridging Regions and Headquarters
Manulife's regional sales teams faced a familiar tension. Each region has its own market, its own customers, and its own priorities, yet headquarters needs all of them moving toward shared strategic goals. Bridging that gap was the first challenge. The second was consistency. Different regions tended to draft and run OKRs in different ways, which made it hard to compare progress or share what worked. The third was ownership. For OKRs to do anything, the sales teams had to care about them, not treat them as a reporting chore handed down from above.
That sense of ownership is especially tricky with sales teams. They respond to clear targets and quick feedback, so an OKR process that felt like extra admin would have been brushed aside. The work had to make OKRs feel like a tool that helped them win, not a form to fill in.
Two-Way Alignment Sessions
The OKR Institute designed a program that joined local realities to central strategy.
- Customized training and workshops: We delivered sessions for the regional sales teams on the basics of OKRs, with a focus on drafting and execution that ties back to company strategy.
- Alignment sessions: We ran sessions between the regional teams and headquarters so each side understood the other, and so regional OKRs could clearly support headquarters goals.
- Ongoing support and tools: We gave teams continued help, including OKR tracking tools, to keep their approach consistent across regions and to keep motivation up.
The alignment sessions did something quietly important. They gave regional teams a chance to be heard by headquarters, not just instructed by it. That two-way understanding made the resulting goals feel shared rather than imposed.
What Made it Work
- Two-way alignment: Regional teams were heard, not just told what to do, which turned goals from mandates into shared commitments.
- Sales-friendly framing: OKRs were positioned as a tool to help teams win, not as extra admin or a reporting chore.
- Consistent tools across regions: Shared tracking tools made it easy to compare progress and share winning tactics.
- Ongoing support: Continued help after training kept the approach alive and improving over time.
What Changed at Manulife
Alignment and cohesion
Regional sales teams lined their OKRs up with headquarters strategy far more effectively, so their work fed directly into Manulife's global goals.
Stronger execution and accountability
Teams executed their OKRs better, with clearer ownership and a more consistent way of reaching key results across regions.
More engagement
Sales teams showed real ownership of their OKRs, driven by a clear line between their daily goals and the company's bigger direction.
Cross-regional learning
With a consistent approach in place, the company could see which regional tactics were working and share them more widely.
What This Shows
Manulife's experience shows that regional teams do not have to choose between local focus and company strategy. With training, alignment sessions, and shared tools, the two can fit together. The key was building a clear, visible link between what a sales team does each day and where the company is headed. When people can see that connection, ownership follows. The two-way nature of the alignment sessions is the detail worth copying. Too many companies treat alignment as a one-way push. Manulife let the regions speak back, which made the final goals feel shared rather than handed down. For sales teams that live and die by their targets, that sense of ownership is often what turns a reporting chore into a tool they genuinely want to use.
