The team agreement that actually gets used
Most team charters are written once, admired briefly, and never opened again. Three things separate the ones that survive.
Nearly every team we meet has a document somewhere describing how they work together. Almost none of them can find it, and the ones who can cannot remember agreeing to it. The document is not the problem. The way it was made is.
Written by the team, in their words
An agreement drafted by a facilitator and approved by a team is a policy. An agreement written by the team, in their own phrasing, including the slightly awkward sentence somebody insisted on, is a commitment. Keep the awkward sentence. It is the one they will remember.
Specific about the failure, not the aspiration
- "We communicate openly" is not an agreement. It is a mood.
- "If you disagree with a decision, you say so before we leave the room, not afterwards" is an agreement. You can tell when it has been broken.
- Every clause should be checkable by somebody who was not in the meeting.
If a clause cannot be broken, it is decoration.
Reviewed on a date somebody owns
Put a review date in the document and a name next to it. Ninety days is about right. The review takes twenty minutes and asks one question per clause: is this still true, and if not, did we change or did we quietly stop trying?
Teams that do this end up with a short, blunt, slightly idiosyncratic document that a new joiner can read in four minutes and immediately understand the group from. That is the artifact worth having.
