Psychological Safety: Team Charters

Team Charters 

In a previous newsletter, we discussed “personal readmes” or “user manuals”. I’m a huge fan of personal readmes as a way to foster psychological safety and cohesion in a group. Through making explicit our own needs, desires, preferences and communication styles, psychological safety is fostered in a group because they know each other better. Personal readmes are an effective shortcut to that interpersonal familiarity (but they don’t negate the need for effective bonding and team building too!).
 

A step on from personal readmes are Team Charters. Team Charters are, in many ways, simple the team-level version of a personal readme. A team charter is co-created by team members and describes anything and everything important about the team. It helps us agree on our shared values, behaviours, expectations and goals, and improves predictability when interacting within the team, which further fosters psychological safety.
 

Team charters help the members of a team cohere and understand what they’re about, what they do, their mission, what their shared values are, their roles, goals, responsibilities, threats, strengths, etc. It’s a fun and effective team building exercise in itself. And even if you threw it away afterwards, it would be a powerful exercise. 

But please don’t throw it away.

It’s also very effective at discovering mismatches, misalignments, or issues on the team caused by different ideas in the team about some of these aspects – such as the mission, purpose, or roles. There’s always something that you’ll discover that team members have significantly different perspectives on, and often these are important enough to resolve immediately in order to build psychological safety and team alignment.

Team Charter Canvas:

Use this list to create your own team charter canvas, or download the psychological safety Playbook Add-on for the Action Pack, which contains a team charter canvas, social contract canvas, and personal and manager manual templates.

Some questions you might want to include in a team charter are below, in no particular order:

• What’s our team name? (You might be surprised to find the number of teams I’ve worked with who couldn’t even agree on this fundamental step!)
• What’s our mission, goal, or purpose?
• Who are we? Who’s on the team?
• What are our shared values?
• What ceremonies and rituals do we have?
• Where does our work come from?
• What’s our Definition of Done?
• How do we communicate with each other?
• When do we work? What times of day? What days of the week?
• What does success look like?
• What does failure look like?
• What are our key metrics? What do we measure?
• What do we need to report on?
• What tools, resources, equipment and skills do we have and need?
• What do we provide to other teams?
• What do we need from other teams?
• How do we interact with other teams?
• Who are our customers?
• What are our assets? What do we own?
• What decisions are we able to make?
• How do we contribute to the success of the organisation?
• What are our risks, threats, or obstacles?
• What makes this team great?
• What could make it even better?
• What do we aspire to be?
• Who are our heroes?
• Who or what is our nemesis?
• When and how do we get together?
• What’s our team mascot?
• If our team were an animal, what would it be?
• What are we going to do next?

This is a lot of questions to ask! You don’t need to ask them all – just choose the most important ones to begin with, and add any of your own that you feel are useful. You may come up with different questions during the creation of the charter – and that’s great! It doesn’t mean you planned badly, it means you’re discovering more through the process.

Here’s one (above) I did recently with a team. This one was actually part of a discovery process intended to surface and identify some of the causes of challenges they were facing. It worked very well in that respect.

Of course, everyone should sign off on the team charter. It’s an artefact with shared ownership and everyone on the team must be bought into it. There may be disagreements about certain aspects; this is a good thing. This means that people care enough about the team to disagree on important aspects. You may need to ask some members to “disagree and commit”, and come back to certain aspects in a later iteration: maybe you can structure some of the elements as experiments to run?

A team charter will get out of date, possibly quite quickly if significant team changes occur, so it should be a living, evolving document. You don’t necessarily need to revisit it every week, but if there’s a cadence to the team such as quarterly off-sites, reviews, monthly meetings etc, they could be a good time to review and improve the team charter. It’s especially important to review it after a significant change, such as someone new joining the team or at the culmination of a large project.

Team charters also help to onboard new folks to the team. It can be scary, confusing and bewildering joining a new team, even if you have an onboarding buddy. A team charter lays out for new joiners much of what is likely to be important for them to know, so they can get up to speed quicker, and more easily feel like they belong. This process of a new joiner to the team is also a great opportunity to ask them if there’s anything missing from the charter that they would have found useful. 

And just as personal user manuals help with interpersonal communication and psychological safety, team charters aid inter-team communication (and inter-team psychological safety?). They help other teams interact with this team, especially if the charter includes details about what the team requires from others, what they can provide, over what timescale, quality, scope, etc. In a later issue, we’ll discuss Team APIs, which dive into this aspect much deeper. Amy Edmondson dives even deeper into “teaming across boundaries“ in her excellent book “Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy“

Finally, whilst the best teams are small, long-lived, autonomous and multi-disciplinary, you can also use team charters quite effectively for transient or short-lived teams. In fact, I’d suggest that if you’re putting together a team for a project, and who will only work together for a short period of time, a team charter is an essential element of convening.

There are some great team charter templates available, including these from Miro, this fun one from Design a Better Business, this process from Asana, or this comprehensive one from Mural. I don’t actually think you really need a template though; just start it. You may even start with the basics, such as team name, members, mission and goals, and expand from there. You don’t (in fact, you can’t) finish it on the first attempt, so as with most things in life, the important thing is to be brave enough to start.

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

Here’s a great paper from Allison Metz, Professor of Practice and Director of Implementation Practice, UNC-CH, on Building trusting relationships to support implementation: A proposed theoretical model. Allison and her co-authors dive into theories of change that examine the relationship between relational trust between stakeholders, and implementation success. They highlight that psychological safety, and implementation success, can be fostered through “relational and technical strategies such as supporting bi-directional communication, increasing frequency of interactions, attaining quick wins, demonstrating empathy, inviting learning, and showing curiosity in the midst of failure.”

On this episode of the Unlearn Podcast, Barry O’Reilly chats with Brian Elliott, Senior Vice President at Slack. Brian describes how he came up with the acronym W.A.I.T (Why am I Talking?). He remarks, “Am I talking because I’m trying to be the smart one in the room? Or can I instead – especially as you get more senior – make space for other people to be able to talk?”

This is a good, honest and powerful self-reflective piece from Dave Rensin, Distinguished Engineer at Google, about the challenges faced and lessons learned from suddenly switching to remote work.

Here’s an interesting piece about middle managers – the article suggests that organisational turmoil due to the pandemic and economic turndown is exacerbating the evergreen problems of middle managers. These include trying to present the strategic priorities that they did not formulate, while at the same time balancing the demands of management with their domain expertise.

This is a great write up of the speakers and their key lessons at the Oslo Business Forum, featuring Amy Edmondson, Steve Wozniak, Nasim Taleb, Zoe Chance and others. This reminded me: I really want to visit Oslo! So if you’re in Oslo, and would like to work with me on training, workshops, programmes or something else, give me a shout!

Things to do and try:

I absolutely love this retrospective template by Yamini Hundare, which takes us on an imaginary hike. I’ll definitely be using this as soon as I can!

In a recent moment of spare time, I played around with some poster designs and created this from some ideas that were floating around my head. I was trying to make the point that we should all, if possible, and no matter what role we play in the team, take actions to foster psychological safety in our groups: we can take the first step.
 

This week’s poem:

The Harvest Moon, by Ted Hughes

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.
 
The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.

And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum.
 

So people can’t sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.

The harvest moon has come! 

And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.
 

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.

Mission statement

The mission of this newsletter is to make the world of work a better, safer, more inclusive and equitable place. We work towards this by sharing, as widely as possible, new research and opinion, case studies, news, practices and methods related to psychological safety. 

This includes topics such as inclusion, human factors, facilitation, safety critical environments, systems thinking, leadership and management, diversity and equity, mental health, organisational dynamics, culture, ethics, and more. 

A core goal is to amplify the voices of minoritised groups and those who are less represented in this field. This includes (but is not limited to) voices of people of colour, neurodiverse people, LGBTQ+ people, women in leadership and tech, and more.

Another goal is to share insights and best practices across different domains: for example, so that those of us in tech may learn from healthcare, and those of us in education can learn from aviation.

I believe knowledge is worthless unless it’s accessible. A key principle of this newsletter is to only share content that everyone can access. This excludes content behind paywalls, research papers that are not open-access, and proprietary tools that don’t open source their algorithms (preventing us from observing how systems make decisions about us). There may be some exceptions to this principle in practice, for example, where authors are able to share original texts of papers.

Whilst this statement will evolve this over time, the core principles of equity, amplification, and progressive & humanistic leadership shouldn’t change.