Practice : Enabling Working Agreements
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Enabling Working Agreements ensures that teams consciously shape how they collaborate. These shared agreements foster mutual understanding, reduce friction, and support healthier team dynamics—especially in cross-functional or distributed environments.
By co-creating and regularly evolving working agreements, teams improve trust, surface misalignments early, and define the conditions under which they can thrive. Leaders who support this process help embed autonomy, inclusion, and a culture of continuous reflection.
Description of the Practice
- Working agreements are team-defined behavioural norms that guide how people collaborate, make decisions, and hold each other accountable.
- They are created collaboratively and reviewed regularly as the team evolves.
- Agreements often cover communication, feedback, ceremonies, expectations, and escalation.
- Leaders facilitate their creation and evolution, but ownership sits with the team.
- Agreements are visible, referenced in rituals, and treated as living artefacts.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Facilitate a workshop to define or refresh team working agreements.
- Use prompts like “What helps us thrive?” or “What should we expect from each other?”
- Encourage input from all roles and levels—aim for shared language, not leadership decree.
- Capture agreements in a visible place (e.g. team board, wiki, Miro).
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Revisit agreements quarterly or during key moments (e.g. onboarding, retros, changes in team makeup).
- Evolve agreements into more advanced topics like decision-making models, inclusion norms, or psychological safety behaviours.
- Use them to guide resolution of tension or ambiguity (“What does our agreement say?”).
- Link agreements to onboarding to help new joiners integrate faster.
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- Teams take pride in their agreements and refer to them in day-to-day work.
- Individuals speak up when norms are unintentionally broken.
- Agreements are used to navigate conflict and improve clarity.
- Teams refine their ways of working based on experience and feedback.
4. Watch Out For…
- Agreements becoming a box-ticking exercise and never revisited.
- One-size-fits-all agreements imposed across teams without context.
- Teams deferring ownership to leaders rather than owning the agreements.
- Values being documented but not modelled or respected in practice.
5. Signals of Success
- Teams use agreements to guide how they collaborate and improve.
- Norms are understood and upheld without relying on formal enforcement.
- Tensions are addressed respectfully, using the agreements as a shared foundation.
- Agreements adapt as the team evolves—not frozen in time.
- New team members quickly feel integrated through clear expectations.