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Establishing a Team Charter


SUMMARY

Are the people in your team constantly at each other, taking everything personally and having heaps of conflict, or do they let a document do the talking for them?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, emotional intelligence speaker, trainer of the year, and master coach trainer. Today, I want to continue our conversation around teamwork and collaboration by helping you to establish a team charter.

Let me unpack for you five key principles that you must adhere to when putting together your team charter.

Number one is to set the intention.
Number two is to enlist every member.
Number three is to agree on priorities.
Number four is to speak through the charter.
Number five is to reinforce through reflection. 

So there you have it, five things to consider when you put together your team norms into a charter.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week when we continue this conversation around teamwork and collaboration by putting the "I" back into team.

I'll see you then.

TRANSCRIPT

Are the people in your team constantly at each other, taking everything personally and having heaps of conflict, or do they let a document do the talking for them?

Well, stick with me because, in this week's episode, I'm going to help you create a structure that will remove all that conflict.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, emotional intelligence speaker, trainer of the year, and master coach trainer. Today, I want to continue our conversation around teamwork and collaboration by helping you to establish a team charter.

Over the last few weeks, I have been talking to you about teamwork and bringing individuals together into a collective to achieve more.

Last week, I talked to you about the four pillars of a great team: collaboration, communication, conflict, and change.

I also tackled how each of those handled will determine whether or not your team goes from a storming team into a norming and performing team.

I talked about those stages of a team weeks before that. And I talked about how individuals come together to make up a team.

Today, I want to establish a guideline, a structure that you can use within your team to encapsulate everything important to the individual members. And then have a document that you then look through when assessing your team's performance.

The underlying principles for this are that people make up a team. And whenever there are human beings involved, there are personalities involved, and there are opportunities for emotions to be handled in a non-healthy way.

Things are said, and people take them personally.

Even when looking at your team's performance, misunderstandings occur because people are going through their uncertainties and have their level of personal power.

When someone sees something going on in the team and speaks to another team member, that can go off the rails, creating even more conflict.

This is one of the reasons why a lot of teams never get out of that storming phase. They stay there, constantly developing this and continually going backward and forward instead of moving forward into that performing team that will get the job done without all the stress and conflict.

So, you need to take the human out of it, take the personality out of it, and bring in more logic through a document.

Whenever you use a set of guidelines or a document to speak through, you're taking the personal side out of it, and I call it a team charter.

The idea is that you come up with a set of guidelines that your team operates from, particularly around working together and the behaviour that are the norms acceptable within your team.

So what I want to do is unpack for you five key principles that you must adhere to when putting together your team charter.

The idea is to end up with a document that everyone has in front of them, whether on the wall or something they have on a card that they can refer to and use to communicate. Going through this process is also going to help build the team.

So just going through the process of putting together the charter will bring them closer together.

So, let's look at these five principles, and then I'll give you a way to get a document that you can use to assess your team.

Number one is to set the intention.

Now, you're listening to this with me, and you're talking to me, and you've been going through this process. However, if you just walk into your team and go, "Hey, I've got a great idea. Let's put a charter together." Some people are not going to understand, and some are even going to see it as something that they're not sure of, so “I'm not playing.”

So the first thing you need to do is make sure that there is communication that sets the intention for the charter.

As I said before, the whole purpose of the charter is to bring you out of that conflict and have a document that you can then use that tells how each of you will behave in this team.

When everybody knows the reason for doing it, they can see the benefit for themselves. And the removal of conflict and those unhealthy conversations that most people want to avoid means that they'll understand why you're even doing this.

So, make sure whatever you do, when you introduce something to your team, people need to know why, and they need to be able to engage with that and see it for themselves.

Set the intention upfront rather than just jump in.

Number two is to enlist every member.

I talked to you about this in my previous episode and agreed that there are "I's" in every team.

Some individuals come together and make a collective.

For this process to work, you need every team member engaged. You need every member to participate in putting this together. The reason you need every member is that this is the team norm for your team. If you've got lone wolves out there and they're not a part of the process, then it's going to bring it all undone.

To do this, you need to make sure that everyone's involved in the process and that everyone understands the benefit for them.

Everyone feels valued. Everyone feels heard. And that individual coming together as a collective creates the team norms moving forward and puts them into the charter.

Number three is to agree on priorities.

Now, every member’s involved.

Every member has their priorities is what's essential in terms of behaviour that would be expected within a team.

So, you go through a process of being able to survey every member of your team and allow them to say what they think is important in terms of behaviour.

It could be, "If we disagree, this is what we do. This is the way we speak to each other. This is how communication goes in our team."

Others might think that punctuality is important. A different group might think that the way conflict is handled is more important.

So, having a process where everybody puts in what they think is a priority gives us the raw materials we need to work on your charter.

Then if you use a process that I can give you access to, you can get everyone to rank what's most important. So you come up with a master list from everyone's ideas, and then you see what's most important. And from that, you can then take those key points and put them together in a charter.

As I said, even this process of putting the charter together brings the team closer because people understand what others value, people know each other on a deeper level, and you get an agreement on something.

This part of the process is extremely important because everyone within the team will need to live up to the standards of that charter.

Number four is to speak through the charter.

So, the whole purpose of putting this charter together was to have a set of team norms around behaviour, around the way that your team works together, that you could refer to. This brings such great value to a team because it removes the personal side.

So, you now have this document with these guidelines on how you'll work together in your team. You can use that document to communicate when looking at how your team's performing.

For example, I can talk to a member of the team who was not living up to one of the guidelines in the team charter. They were constantly late, and we'd said that this is how punctuality is valued in this team.

Instead of me going, "Hey, you're late all the time." I'm able to take a separate document from me personally and go: "Hey, do you feel right now that you and I are working together under this point 5 here."

So, the fact that it's an external document, it's not me speaking against their behaviour. And it's an external document that they agreed on, that they were involved in creating, and they look at it differently and go, "Yeah, I understand." And then there's an opportunity to move forward and shift the behaviour.

As a leader of a team, you've now got this charter to bring in front of your team when there are challenges and go, "Hey team, we're doing well here, and we're producing this. However, there are still a lot of conflicts, and people are not speaking up when there are challenges. They're just avoiding it, and it's not moving forward, and we agreed that this is what we were going to do."

So now that you've got this charter, its whole purpose is not just to hang on a wall so that everyone can see it; it's to speak through it when some challenges and adjustments need to be made in the team.

Number five is to reinforce through reflection.

Now, if you've been hanging around with me for any period, you'll know that there's a certain way that we reflect.

When you reflect on what is past, you do it in a way that is looking forward.

So, you're not reflecting just to go back and find out everything that's gone wrong. You regularly reflect to pick up what you did well and pick up things that you could do differently with a focus on where you're going, which is moving forward to that team's goal.

The same thing is true with your charter. So, this isn't something that you build once, and you never change.

So you need to make sure that you update your charter. You sometimes need to shift the language so that it makes more sense. So this is a working document that, over some time, with a few tweaks and adjustments, becomes exactly what you need in your team.

It also gives you an opportunity when you reflect to celebrate progress. And you can see how behaving this way as a team, as you have said on your charter, took you to where you arrived and the results you got.

So it reinforces the importance of the charter and the individual components of that charter.

So there you have it, five things to consider when you put together your team norms into a charter.

If you would like a copy of an assessment that you can use with your team to go through this process, just comment below, and I will get you that. If you're watching this on my website, there's a link there to grab hold of that. And take that, go in, and build your team charter.

Having a document that speaks through the challenges in the team removes all that personal angst and conflict and allows the team to have their own set of boundaries on the way that they do things, and it's something to stand for together with pride.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week when we continue this conversation around teamwork and collaboration by putting the "I" back into team.

I'll see you then.

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