22 Mar TSLH #012: 6 Components Of A Strong Team Charter
Read time: 6 minutes
Last week’s newsletter on the 5 steps I systematically use when taking on a new team sparked quite a lot of interest and feedback from many of you.
I had several people reaching out specifically about the 5th point I had mentioned, namely “Meet the team to start shaping it the way you and people on the team want to have it.”
I thought that instead of replying individually to everyone, I would have today’s issue of the newsletter exactly about that specific step and what I do exactly to start engaging the team and building it in a way that will create high performance, accountability and collaboration.
First of all, the size of your team matters. And for what I will walk you through below, I recommend to focus on your direct reports as a first step, and you can then cascade down from there so that the entire team is engaged in the process of defining how everybody works together so that the team is collaborative, committed and high-performing.
Obviously, if you have a team of 200 people, it will be hard to reach any kind of consensus on how you want to be as a team. This is why I recommend primary focus on your direct reports. They can then be relays to their own teams. Later, you can then have a one-day event/workshop with your full team to practice, repeat, discuss all the findings and actions decided and make sure that everyone is aligned on them.
So, when you gather your direct reports to work on the team as a system, what you really want to do is what is called a team charter.
A team charter is essentially a guide that defines who the team is, what it does, and how it behaves. Below is a model I like using.
I want to re-emphasize here that before working on the team charter, you should have an honest and transparent discussion with your team on their current state. You can do that by using my suggestions from last week:
- Discuss what kind of team they are currently, what their strengths and areas of improvement are, what their current challenges and pain points are.
- Understand from them what works well in the way they work as a team, and what does not work so well within the team or with other teams.
- Ask about what their shared values and beliefs are.
Understanding all this will give you a lot of clues of how “mature” your team is as a system, e.g., how well they can agree to a common set of values and behaviors and systematically use them as a team. Or what they see as their goals as a team and how they contribute to the overall success of the organization.
Now, it’s time to work on the team charter. As suggested by the picture above, you should spend time in 6 areas.
Vision and values. This is really the foundation of the team, what creates the essence, the DNA of your team. You want people on your team to share a common set of values and behaviors that will help define how the team works together and with other teams, and that will persist with time. You also want to work on the vision for your team, i.e., what is it that the team exists for?
I usually start with values. You can identify them in several ways. Here are common exercises I run with my teams to work on values:
- Description of best experiences for the team
- Description of challenges the team experienced
- Using a value card deck exercise
The idea is to use these discussions and exercises to identify values that matter to people (not only in the context of the team or their work) and agree on values that the team has to share in order to thrive. When I worked with one of my teams, we came up with values like reliability, trust, problem solver, which were important for people to have on the team. We also identified work/life balance and fun as being 2 critical shared values we wanted to have in the team.
The next step is the vision. It is a broad statement of why the team exists and what its ultimate purpose is. You can use values to help guide the discussion on the vision. The best vision statements I have seen are usually one sentence long, with a few keywords that reflect some of the strongest values of the team.
Team processes. In that step, I discuss what the roles and responsibilities of people on the team are, how the decision-making process works, and how we ensure the team stays collaborative, engaged, productive and high-performing.
Roles & responsibilities go beyond just what each person does in my opinion. To me, it is about understand what strength each person on the team brings, and what learning objective each person has. It involves discussing about what each team member brings to the team (a different perspective, a critical skill) and understand what each person’s expectation of their role and the team is. During that discussion, I also like to understand what we expect of other teams and what other teams expect from us.
Decision-making is a key process in a team. My strong belief is that the leader of the team should not be the only one owning this process. On the contrary, for the team to thrive and be engaged and high-performing, my belief is that everybody on the team should participate in the decision-making process. It is of course not about letting everyone give their opinion on any subject. It is for instance about making it a rule that everybody in the team should decide how they work and how they produce results: The team and their leaders should only be concerned with the outcomes.
This is also about understanding what decisions must be made by the team and what is out of bounds. This is about discussing who we should involve for prior approval. This is about how we stay accountable to decisions made.
An engaged team will happen when you, as the leader, can guarantee 3 things:
- Everybody understands their role in the team and the fact that the team is what matters in the end.
- How leadership is shared within the team, based on leveraging each individual’s specific skills.
- There is clarity on what is expected of the team.
Goals. No team can exist or thrive if there is not a clear direction and a path set with milestones to stay on that path. This is what goals are about.
The discussion on goals is an important one, because the goals are never an independent set of goals. They are a function of goals and imperatives set by the entire organization and they must also take into account goals that matter for the people on the team.
When you start with a new team, the discussion on goals is different than what will happen in subsequent years. Especially so if the team and the situation you inherit pose immediate challenges to you as the leader. In such cases, the discussion on goals becomes critical for the team to start strong.
For instance, one of the teams I became the leader for faced massive attrition problems, was not able to collect cash from clients nor paying suppliers on time, to name but a few of the challenges I encountered. There was no point in trying to set grandiose visionary goals yet. The priority was to set short-term goals that would make an immediate impact on the performance of the team. And this is exactly the discussion I had with my direct reports: Define 3 short-term goals and design a plan to achieve them within a reasonable time (which we defined as 3 months at that time).
Once you have your urgent goals behind you or you have actions set for them, you can review your organization’s goals and align your team on these goals. For instance, one of the corporate goals we had was “No client left behind”. When we translated this goal for our finance team, our goal became “We simplify the contracting process for clients”.
Communication & coordination. As in any other leadership activity, transparency and clarity are key and it is critical for the team to communicate effectively about the team and its performance for instance.
There are really 3 areas that the team needs to discuss and agree on as far as communication goes:
- How the team wants to communicate within the team and outside. It could be about who communicates, the process that must be applied to communicate. It’s also about how the team goes with cascading down communication to the rest of the team.
- What information the team wants to share and with whom. This participates in creating the trust that is needed within the team but also with other teams.
- How the team will keep track of progress on commitments and actions and communicate these to the appropriate stakeholders. Again, this activity needs to be coordinated and made as transparent as possible to create trust in the team, and also credibility.
Authority & accountability. In my opinion, this is the single most important item in building your team and setting the tone on accountability. Authority to me designates how the leadership is shared within the team and what other levels of approvals the team needs to pull and in what situations. This is something I have addressed under team processes above.
Accountability though has to do with how the team remains consistently aligned with what it decided and agreed it would be as a team. This is one of the team’s hardest activity to perform to ensure strong collaboration, productivity and high performance.
To establish accountability in the team, I usually engage in a discussion that evolves around 6 basic and critical questions:
- How does the team handle conflict and disagreement?
- How does the team handle someone in the team who is outside the norms and behaviors we all defined together?
- How does the team support each other and support someone struggling on the team?
- What are our standards for high quality work and how does the team handle subpar work by someone?
- What will not be tolerated in the team? And from someone outside the team?
- What are the team’s standards for learning and how does the team support each other to learn and develop?
There are surely other questions that would come up in a discussion. However focusing on these 6 allow setting strong ground rules for the behavior and the accountability of the team. Once you have agreed on how you will handle conflict, someone struggling, poor performance, standards of work, etc. you will have set expectations with everybody that there is no finger pointing in the team, and everyone is accountable to the rest of the team for behaving and supporting others as expected.
Resources. Last but not least, understand that your team is not a closed system. The team will exchange information in and out with other teams, with internal stakeholders (other divisions, senior leadership, etc.) or external stakeholders (clients, vendors, banks, etc.) The team must discuss what resources and support the team itself and all other stakeholders need.
I identify 4 main areas to focus on:
Senior leadership & other stakeholders. The team needs to understand who the other stakeholders are, what each of them expects from the team, what each of them needs from the team. The team must understand how each stakeholder can support them, for instance by allocating resources to the team.
One exercise I often do in team coaching is what I call the “land exercise”. When I took up a finance team once, there were challenges with the sales team. I helped alleviate these challenges by doing the land exercise. In a nutshell, this exercise consists in having people do 3 activities: First, each team works on what their land looks like (e.g. what my priorities in finance are, what I typically need from others). Then, without yet presenting, teams switch and finance will imagine themselves in the land of sales. Finance now has to work on what that land looks like (e.g., what I think the priorities in that land are, what I think the support that land needs from finance is, etc.) Then you have both teams present their findings and get (usually) to an a-ha moment of “I did not realize this was a priority for you.” or “I did not know you were struggling with these requests.” This helps the teams better align. And lastly, both teams now have to imagine the land of the upper level (e.g., senior leadership) and what that group expects from both teams. This is where teams often realize that their struggles with other teams are if not irrelevant, at least not important in the grand scheme of things and that they’d better work things together so that they address the needs of senior leadership for instance.
Supporting resources for the team. Remember when you had to ask each of your direct report or your team as a group what they would change immediately if they had a magic wand? This is where you need to discuss these things and agree on prioritizing them so the team can ask for resources to their big boss, whatever they are: people, money, tools, etc.
Training needs. Now that you have a good understanding of who is in the team, what strengths people have, and what each person needs to learn or improve on, you need to discuss with the team about the training needs so that you can access these resources.
Information needs. A good discussion to have with your team is also to understand whether the team has access to the information it needs. The team needs to understand what information it needs, whom it needs it from, and how it is best accessed.
So, you now have a strong process to work on a team charter with your team. It is definitely not an exercise that will take only a few hours. If you are serious about it, it’s easily a 2-day workshop – if not more in some cases – that you need to take your team through. It is a great investment to make though. As the leader of the team, you will reap plenty of benefits for having made that work early on as you became the new leader of a team.
I wish you a great read and great experimentation. I’ll see you next Saturday!
TL; DR (Too Long, Did not Read)
6 activities to create a team charter that builds a high performing team
- Vision & values.
- Team processes.
- Goals.
- Communication & coordination.
- Authority & accountability.
- Resources.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
1️⃣ Work 1-1 with me to step up as the authentic leader you aspire to be.
2️⃣ Hire me to help you build a high-performing team.
3️⃣ Start with my affordable digital courses on Mastering Difficult Conversations for Leaders and Goal Setting