How Do We Run a Client-Facing Retrospective Meeting?
The question:
“How do we run a client-facing retrospective meeting (a.k.a. post-mortem or debrief)?”
My answer:
A client-facing retrospective review is a great way to build trustful relationships with your client contacts.
Some clients and teams may not talk as much as they should about how they could improve the way they work together. A client retrospective is an easy way to get that type of discussion started in a safe space where the client is expected to reflect on and discuss what’s been working well and what needs improvement.
I recommend frequent client retrospectives — every few weeks or after a key milestone, depending on the client and the work being delivered.
Who from your agency should participate?
If you’re discussing the agency/client relationship on a general level, include your account/team leaders. If you’re discussing specific issues, include those most informed to speak to the issues and who can add the most value to the discussion from your client's perspective. If discussing an engagement that went poorly, add a neutral facilitator from your side to help run the discussion.
It's great for all team members to get face time with clients and hear feedback firsthand, but aim to limit the number of agency attendees to a similar count of people your client will have on the call. Record the call so the larger team can watch and learn from the client's feedback later.
How do you set up the meeting?
The goal is for both parties to feel comfortable sharing honest feedback to build a trustful relationship.
Here's some messaging you can borrow (below). Sharing this language before the meeting can also help your client determine who they should invite from their side.
Messaging:
Our agency has adopted a new set of operating principles to help us create a more valuable client experience. One of those principles states: "Regularly reflect on our team performance and quickly apply our learning to our work." We consider our clients to be part of the team, so for the clients that are open to it, we regularly reflect on each other's performance to learn how to work better together to deliver the outcomes we all want.
We do this with what we call a retrospective review (retro). By doing this regularly (every 2-3 weeks rather than at the end of a project or campaign) these discussions help keep us all aligned on the highest priorities and help us adapt if anything changes.
The purpose of a retro is to learn from one another how we can work better together to achieve our shared set of target outcomes. The agenda is typically as follows:
Together, as a group, we answer four questions:
What worked well over the past 2-3 weeks?
What could we all have done better?
What did we all learn?
What will we change for our next work cycle regarding how we work as a team?
The guidelines for each participant are to:
Listen with an open mind and avoid thinking in terms of blame.
Work to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing anything they think will help the team (agency and client) learn and improve. This means we need to create psychological safety (see below).
The outcomes everyone on the call should aim for are:
We all establish a shared understanding of how well we're working together as a team.
We identify the highest priority improvements that should be made.
Participants proactively volunteer to “own” action items for improvements identified during the meeting.
A meeting summary is recorded and made available to the group.
About psychological safety:
Google ran a two-year study called Project Aristotle - interviewing 180 teams to learn what makes a team a high-performing team. They found that psychological safety was the top commonality across teams. When team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other, information flows quicker (no one is holding back), and performance and innovation increase.
Here are a few ways to create an environment that promotes psychological safety:
Encourage everyone to contribute
Everyone listens to one another
Review/repeat people’s points after they've shared them to let them know you've heard them
Avoid dominating or interrupting the discussion
Be caring, curious, non-judgmental
Running the meeting
When you run the meeting, be sure to stick to the agenda, guidelines, and intended outcomes and let the learning begin.
