Most friction on a team comes from unchecked assumptions and expectations nobody said out loud.
We have all felt it. A meeting where the same people talk and everyone else stays silent. A decision that gets revisited many times over because half the team never agreed, there was a lack of buy-in or a failure to communicate the importance. A colleague who raises a concern with everyone except the person who could do something about it. None of these moments look like a crisis on their own. But they repeat, the team absorbs the cost in slower decisions, non-productive meetings, frustration and lack of team morale. The higher cost is often that people stop bringing their best thinking because it never seems to land anywhere. Slowly but surely it becomes the team culture.
The fix is simple, but not always easy. It requires willingness to engage and to create accountability. The conversation high performing teams never go without having and low performing teams never know they need. High performing teams that work on creating a culture that will support them in both success and hard times ask: how do we want to be together, and what can each of us be counted on for? What guidelines or rules do we have in place when it gets difficult?
Because difficult it will be from time to time. That is also where teams and people grow and leadership gets honed.
Here’s what that conversation looks like.
Team Agreements and Ground Rules
The tool covers two areas
Creating the atmosphere — the mood or climate the team wants to create. Designing the atmosphere deliberately means that when circumstances change, the atmosphere you’ve built travels with you into whatever comes next. It gives continuity when nothing else holds steady.
Sharing responsibility — what each person can rely on from the others.
Each person is responsible for helping create the experience the team needs.
Talk through and clarify, together:
- What mood, atmosphere or culture do we want to create?
- How do we want this team to feel? (Supportive, safe, open, playful, warm, spacious, and so on.)
- What will help this team thrive?
- How do we want to show up when things get difficult? (Who do we want to be?)
- What do we want to always be able to rely on in each other?
- What do we value and appreciate in each other, and in this team?
These rules of engagement are for every meeting and every interaction. Doing it once and thinking you are done is a waste of time. You need to bring them to life so that they become the air the team breathes and relies on. Practise it so that it becomes ‘in the bones’ knowledge and the wanted behaviour happens on autopilot. If you treat it as a great idea to use once as a kick-off conversation you might as well drop it. All you would accomplish is disappointment and distrust. Integrate it into regular meetings, upcoming events, projects and as ongoing support as the team develops and matures.
A team might, for example, create rules of engagement for how they want to work together during a reorganisation, a demanding deadline, a change in leadership, or a difficult season for the business. Carry what you learn into the next conversation, and keep building a shared understanding of what the team needs to function at its best.
Following rules of engagement is practising checking out assumptions and naming expectations, hopes and concerns.
Assumptions and expectations
Check assumptions by saying:
“Can I check something with you? I have an assumption that you… Is that right?”
If you get a ‘yes, that’s right,’ talk about it. If you get a ‘no, that doesn’t check,’ be willing to let it go.
Clarify expectations by stating plainly what you expect. This creates mutual understanding and helps avoid disappointment. It isn’t the team as a whole or other people’s responsibility to solve it for you, but being heard helps us feel valued and appreciated, and equally important the team learns what might get in the way, what they should look out for and what to aim for. The key word is clarify. Unspoken expectations can cause havoc, but when spoken they increase understanding and trust.
Why this holds where policy doesn’t
A team-created set of agreements that the team has spent time, honesty and trust to create holds. There is ownership, the team knows what is important and why. So very different from a prewritten set of team norms documented and filed away that nobody opens again.
This works differently because it isn’t a rule imposed on the team, it’s something the team designs together, in their own words, based on what they’ve noticed about each other and what they want to build. People keep agreements they helped create. They ignore ones handed to them.
When it becomes a part of the team’s identity, where atmosphere and responsibility are revisited as the team changes, a project shifts, or when something in the culture starts sliding, it becomes the team’s safety net. The conversation that opens a team’s work together is the same conversation that carries it through whatever comes.
It can be useful to have someone facilitate a conversation like this, but what it really requires is setting aside enough time where the team sit down, together, and ask these questions of each other directly, and being honest about the answers. That’s the whole method. The rest is showing up to it.