Most, More, Better, Best, Worst

Magnify your impact at work with a project retrospective

Last week we discussed leverage, a mathematical principle that allows a small amount of effort to produce a greater amount of force.

It was a bit dry, wasn’t it? I picked a more humane title for today’s piece. We’ll see if anyone notices.

As promised, today I’ll discuss some ways to help you get a sense of better leverage at work. Most people feel better about their work when it’s having a greater impact. Emotionally intelligent people want to help their teams feel that sense of leverage as well.

When I can influence the way things get done, that’s a highly leveraged opportunity to impact what gets done.

Today I’ll share one of the best ways I’ve found to do that.

Post-Mortem Retrospective

A small team was assembled to try to quickly solve some difficult problems. The bosses gave this small team a coveted spacious office with a door, on which a sign was hung “PROJECT WAR ROOM.” The team objected to the unnecessarily bellicose metaphor, took the sign down, and replaced it with a hand-lettered sign:

- PEACE LOUNGE -

Words matter!

Post-mortem comes from the medical term describing injuries sustained “after death.” Mors is the Latin root for death: as in mortuary, mortal, and mortgage¹.

This unpleasant association might be part of the reason why post-mortem meetings are sparsely attended. Fortunately, there’s a simple replacement term that conjures a serene and thoughtful process of reflection on the past: Retrospective.

Ah, retrospective. It sounds like something you can sell tickets to!

Over some years, I’ve developed thoughts on Project Retrospective agendas by combining some of what I’ve learned as a people and product leader with ideas about psychological safety and emotional intelligence.

Retrospective Agenda

Here’s my agenda for an emotionally intelligent retrospective, expressed in emoji:

🏆👍👎👏⛔️

These stand for fives sections that address the people, process, and outcomes that determine the success of a project:

• Most

• More

• Better

• Best

• Worst

Ready? Here we go!

🏆 *Most* Valuable Person

Celebration first! Discuss the contributions of each of the people who contributed to the project, even if in a relatively minor role. The project leader should oversee this part of the conversation, working from a roster of everyone who participated.

(It’s crucial that this be done carefully. Leaders frequently and carelessly forget to acknowledge someone when working from memory, and this slight will not soon be forgotten. On the other hand, even small gestures of recognition are meaningful to teammates who sometimes feel a bit invisible.)

The team can make nominations for one or more most valuable persons. Create your own method of celebrating your MVP that feels right for your company. Announce the award in a company all-hands meeting. Ask your management to consider MVP’s eligibility for one-time or “spot” bonuses. (Not everyone agrees that spot bonuses are a good idea, but I have never known a highly toxic workplace that routinely paid them.)

Next up:

👍 What worked well? Can we do *more* of it?

👎 What didn’t work? How do we do *better*?

Let’s make decisions about how our process should change based on what we learned in this project. What should we do more of? Rather than asking what we should do less, let’s instead ask what we could change for the better.

The team should discuss the various aspects of the project that were conducted according to the prescribed process. How did the process suit the project? The goal is to empower a scientific assessment of each aspect of the process, by measuring its impact while the results are fresh in everyone’s mind.

If you set quantifiable goals for your projects, or the team set other metrics or targets to achieve, this is the time to decide whether you achieved them or fell short. You can discuss whether the goals were the right ones, and what might be changed to improve your performance against them next time.

Have you ever worked under a process that everybody knows is broken, but that never seemed to get fixed? Everybody has. It’s common for there to be no established forum for discussing, measuring, or modifying the process. It has always been this way. Nobody knows why.

This is an essential purpose of a project retrospective. It’s a laboratory in which your process can be scrutinized, and where you can make suggestions for how it should be altered.

The last pair of topics for the retrospective are especially important if your project teams are still comprised primarily of human members. Research has consistently shown that human people perform best in workplaces that cultivate psychological safety. Here are two topics to support those needs:

👍 What were the best decisions we made?

👎 What were the worst decisions?

Experienced leaders know that it’s easy to learn what everybody thinks when they’re thinking something good. Finding out what mistakes you’ve made — that’t another story.

Retrospectives are a crucial opportunity for leaders to cultivate psychological safety — an open, trusting environment where challenging or unpleasant ideas can safely be shared without fear of recrimination or retaliation.

Noticing what worked well during your projects is important! Aspects that gave rise to problems welcome scrutiny, but you cannot objectively evaluate their efficacy unless you’ve also counted the instances in which they worked. It takes some vigilance to ensure that recency and availability don’t cause you to reach conclusions that are unduly influenced by whatever just happened.

An emotionally intelligent thing for a leader to do in a project retrospective is to simply and candidly admit their own mistakes. In a truly safe work environment, people readily confess their own errors without a sense of fear or vulnerability. Realistically, nobody loves going to a meeting where their mistakes will be pointed out. It is possible, however, to cultivate an environment where teams are sharing ideas about they can mutually improve.

A great way to make this conversation as comfortable as possible is to amplify the idea that the goal of the conversation is to critically evaluate the process, not the people. The person leading the conversation can set this as a ground rule: nobody is perfect, everybody makes mistakes, and the role of our process is to be realistic and practical about anticipating those scenarios and planning for them.

Wrapping Up

There are two primary goals of the Project Retrospective. The first is to help the people you’re working with have a good experience. When I’m putting my best effort into something, I want to have the sense that my contribution will be lasting and meaningful. A retrospective meeting gives the team an opportunity to process their experiences during the project, and to cement the connections that they built with their colleagues.

This happens best when Project Retrospectives yield decisions about change. Every project has its successes, which leaders should seek to celebrate, amplify, and replicate. Every project has its failures, which should be understood and avoided.

By making a retrospective part of your process, and building a cultural practice around it that you use to continually change and improve your process, you’re giving your team a sense that their work can have an even greater impact.

Everybody has a different idea about retrospectives. I’d love to hear from you about what’s worked or hasn’t for you in your own experiences. Hit reply or leave a comment here. I’m eager to learn from you!

1. The suffix -gage in mortgage is from an old French word for pledge, as in “engagement.” So the word mortgage literally means “the pledge of death.”