Last month, we held our first Visuals Team retrospective, and I quickly learned that it was long overdue. We formed the team in December 2013, so it had been more than a year since we had discussed, as a big group, how we ought to work together.
It was a humbling experience, to say the least. Problems with our process and our structure had been simmering for months — many of which I was completely unaware.
I’m now working on addressing these problems.
Some changes were really quick to implement. For example, we had previously limited our planning meeting to four people: myself, my co-editor, our project manager and our lead architect. The intent was never to cut people out of the process, but to avoid adding unnecessary meetings to people’s calendars.
Well, it turns out that this one was necessary. Without insight into our planning process, people felt alienated — like cogs in a machine. So, now our weekly planning is mandatory for the core four, and optional for everybody else. So far, nearly everyone has attended, every week. I think it’s helping.
In the future, I intend to conduct team retrospectives quarterly. Like in any relationship, it’s good to talk, often.
Another issue we identified was that people don’t feel like they’re respected as authorities, both inside the team and within the greater the newsroom.
This is a tricky one for me. I’ve long avoided flaunting my title, and, as people who’ve worked with me know, I make a point of not showing off our accolades. (To remind ourselves that users are our top priority, we keep the awards in a drawer.)
But we’re a little group tasked with big things, inside an organization that, frankly, has no idea how to do the things we do. And to be effective, we need respect. Titles are important.
(I’m simplifying all of this a bit, because politics.)
And responsibility without authority creates apathy, fast. Your job sucks when you have no control (creative control, quality control, control over your priorities, etc.) over your work.
So we’ve got to change some things internal to the team, but we’ll also need to change how the greater newsroom works with us. This will take a while.
In the meantime, I’ve made two tiny changes to how *I* do things:
I’ve started using an email signature, with my complete title “Supervising Senior Editor, Visuals”, and a link to our manifesto.
And I took all the awards out of the drawer — they’re now thoughtfully arranged on a table, in full view of the newsroom.
