Leadership and People Management: Foundations to Practice · Building High-Performing Teams
Team Norms and Charters
Many teams operate with a set of unstated, informally assumed norms that different members interpret differently, and making those norms explicit, even briefly, prevents a specific and common source of team friction.
Every team operates according to some set of norms, whether stated explicitly or simply assumed, covering things like how quickly a message deserves a response, how decisions actually get made, and how disagreement should be raised. When these norms remain unstated, different team members often carry genuinely different assumptions about what the actual norm is, and friction that results from this mismatch frequently gets misattributed to a specific individual's personality or work ethic, when the underlying cause is simply an unstated, mismatched expectation nobody ever actually agreed on together.
- Unstated team norms produce genuine friction when different members carry different assumptions, often misattributed to personality rather than mismatched expectations.
- A team charter explicitly covers purpose, decision-making norms, communication expectations, and how conflict will be handled.
- A charter built collaboratively by the team, rather than handed down unilaterally, produces stronger buy-in and surfaces concerns a leader working alone would miss.
- A charter should be revisited periodically as a team grows, since a norm that worked at a smaller size may not scale cleanly to a larger one.