Back-to-Back Perfect Marks: What Our Latest Worldcom Peer Review Taught Us

Every few years, we open up our agency to a group of our peers and let them take a close look at how we operate.

And I mean a close look.

As part of our membership in the Worldcom Public Relations Group, senior leaders from fellow agencies review everything from our processes and financials to client feedback, professional development and how we measure our work. These are people who run agencies themselves. They know what to ask, where to dig and what a well-run agency should look like.

This month, we learned that The Pollack Group earned perfect marks in our peer review for the second cycle in a row. I’m incredibly proud of that. But what I value most about the process isn’t the score.

Why we do it

We joined Worldcom in 1999, and the peer review process was one of the things that appealed to us from the beginning. There’s no shortage of agencies that will tell you they do great work, have great people and take great care of their clients. Peer review asks you to prove it. Every few years, we have experienced agency leaders come in and look under the hood. They ask questions about how we work, how we measure success, how we support our people and whether we’re building an agency that clients can count on for the long term. It’s rigorous, and it should be.

What they’re looking for

The review covers a lot of ground, but much of it comes back to a few basic questions. Are we being honest about what’s working and what isn’t? Are our clients consistently getting the level of work they expect from us? Are we financially healthy and built for the long term? Are we investing in our people and helping them get better at what they do? And are we contributing to Worldcom in a way that makes the network stronger for our clients and our partners? Those aren’t questions we should only be asking ourselves every few years. They’re questions we should be asking all the time.

What I took away from this one

Of course, earning a perfect score feels good. Earning one twice in a row feels even better. But what stays with me after these reviews is usually the conversation. Having other agency leaders examine how we operate forces us to look at things differently. Sometimes they validate what we’re doing. Sometimes they ask a question that makes us reconsider something we’ve been doing for years.

That’s the value of the process.

After 27 years as part of Worldcom, I don’t see peer review as something we have to get through. I see it as an opportunity to make sure, we’re still holding ourselves to the standards we’ve set for this agency.

This year’s score tells me we are. It also gives us a reason to keep pushing. I’m grateful to our reviewers and our Worldcom partners, but most of all, I’m proud of the TPG team. They’re the reason we earned these marks two reviews in a row.

To learn more about TPG’s partnership in Worldcom, visit: https://worldcomgroup.com/partners/pollack-group/