Team Charter — create it, save it, forget it!
Waste of time activity. Team Charter is ‘text book’ agile. Never saw it working!!
Does that all sound familiar? Heard of before?
And this is how it starts. Drum rolls. Organization / Project / Program wants to transform followed by discussions to align Organisation Goals, tons of new processes, restructures, new team formations and so on (let’s not open the can of worms here). And when teams are formed, more often than not, the first mile begins with a “Team Charter” creation discussion (and many more synonyms you’d known).
It’s a good start, don’t get me wrong here! While I have experienced the effectiveness of a Team Charter, I also have seen the flip side of not having one or having one and not using it. When a Team gets together to create a Charter, how many times someone even challenges WHY should we have one? Seen that before? May be.
So let’s take a sneak peak at the history of it before actually to understand WHY should a team have one.
This is how Wikipedia defines Social Contract (a.k.a. Team Charter) -
Upon exploring history pages, there are evidences that says —
- The heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries
- Social contract theory are found in Greek philosophy and mentions found in Roman Law
- Social Contract was an integral part of British Labour party policy in the 1970s
A book called “The Social Contract”, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau was published in 1762. This proves that this concept has been a part of culture and system for ages.
In case you missed the historic dates, goes back to 17th, 18th & 19th Century. Yes, that’s right !
Some of the key messages that’s evident from history pages are —
- Individuals’ actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience
- Law and Political order are not natural, but human creations
Fast forward to today. How does this relate to the Team Charter exercise that a team undertakes? To answer that, let’s quickly recap on key elements of Team Charter —
So what? Well, it simply means a team lives with multi-dimensional complexities. The journey towards being a performing team (ref. Tuckman’s model) interacting with Organisational structure is a given, and that’s a different blog topic probably. And exactly when the team starts gelling well and are in harmony, exactly then, the focus remains on delivery and often aspects like Individual Skills uplift, Team social activities time, time to experiment & all that becomes a thing of the past. Quite contradictory to those time proven researches on Collaboration & Team Science.
So HOW can Team Charter help here? Let’s look at some from organizational attributes that affects a teams performance & often missed out being answered in the Charter —
How often does the team have explicitly called out what to do to manage conflicts?
Are the team members talking to each other or over each other? Do we trust each other? What did we capture in the charter?
Goals are delayed and one of the factors is dependency wasn’t addressed in time. Who could’ve helped resolve the dependency in time? Did we refer to external teams in our Charter we have dependencies with?
Sprint and then Sprints and then Quarter. We have targets. Sure. And what about Individual growth (and as a team)? Did we not capture Personal Goals, Needs & Expectations in the Charter? Let’s have a look to remind ourselves.
Does team often get distracted due to conflict in decision making? What did we agree to in the Charter?
Do we have new team members in? Be inclusive. Update your Charter to include their thoughts.
Suffering from ineffective processes? Revise your Charter to define effective processes.
Are we able to live within the norms we’ve created for ourselves? What’s working? What’s not? Retrospect your Charter and Adapt.
These are just a ‘tip of the iceberg’ elements. Working as a team, we all have good intentions to collaborate & wanting to bring our best self to work. Though, end of day we as humans run into different tangents due to various reasons professional, personal or purely situational — no finger pointing please. What’s important here is to think how can we stay strong, stay together & constantly support each other to build a unique team culture that every other team in the organisation wants to be like us.
So go for gold ! Create your Team Charter and more importantly, USE IT to keep your Team Culture & practices breathing and alive. Do remember to put your signature on the Charter. You own it as a team!
By the way, by now you would’ve realised that the title was intentionally cheeky!
So what are your experiences with Team Charters? Do Comment and Share.
