Creating a Team Charter

If you've been following this series of posts, you now have your clear vision for the team. That means that you can now work to make your team gel by developing a team identity around this vision, and the way the individuals in the team would like to operate.

A key element of this is the development of a Team Charter – this is a document, created by the team members together, which maps out how the team will operate. It brings a number of advantages:

• Team members feel “bought in” to the success of the team
• Greater adherence to “rules” as everyone has had input into their development
• Mindset that it’s “our” team, rather than “the leader’s team”

Team charters are flexible documents which should be reviewed annually, or whenever there’s a major change in the team’s make-up, such as new members joining.

The elements of a team charter
Whilst there’s no set way to create a team charter, there are some areas which are useful to consider when developing this agreement. These include:

1. Why the team exists
2. What the team aspires to achieve in the future
3. Beliefs and principles which govern how the team acts
4. Defining responsibilities and describing members’ USCs
5. How the team will interact, hold each other to account, and support each other
6. Conflict resolution, meeting structures, decision-making norms

If you'd like Navanter’s Team Charter template as a separate Word document which you can use as a baseline for the development of a charter for your own team, you can download it from the Navanter Knowledge Bites resource page. Just follow the links in the top menu.