Practice : Team Working Agreements

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Team Working Agreements are explicitly defined, collectively owned norms that describe how a team commits to working together. They cover everything from communication preferences and meeting behaviour to how the team handles conflict, makes decisions, and supports each other under pressure. Making implicit expectations explicit is a leadership act that reduces friction, builds equity, and creates accountability for culture.

Without working agreements, teams default to the norms of their most dominant members, their most recent toxic experience, or vague institutional expectations that rarely serve anyone well. Leaders who facilitate and hold working agreements create teams that self-manage more effectively and extend trust to new members faster.

Description of the Practice

  • Working agreements are co-created by the team, not written by the leader and handed down.
  • They cover: communication, decision-making, meeting behaviour, conflict handling, and inclusion.
  • They are documented, visible, and regularly reviewed — not created and forgotten.
  • Leaders model the agreements publicly and name violations when they occur (including their own).
  • New team members engage with the agreements as part of onboarding.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Facilitate a team session focused on: "How do we want to work together? What has worked before? What has frustrated us?"
  • Group themes and draft agreements that are specific enough to guide behaviour: "We start meetings on time and end 5 minutes early for transition" beats "We respect each other's time."
  • Agree explicitly, not just implicitly — a show of hands is not enough. Name any tensions.
  • Write them up and make them accessible — in a team space, a wiki, or a shared document.

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Review working agreements every quarter or after any significant team change (new members, restructures, major incidents).
  • When a working agreement is breached, name it without blame: "I noticed we drifted from our agreement about — let's talk about whether the agreement still works."
  • Extend working agreements to include how the team engages with adjacent teams.
  • Use the retrospective process to surface emerging tensions that suggest the agreements need updating.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Team members hold each other to working agreements, not just the leader.
  • New team members contribute to the next review of the agreements — they bring a fresh perspective.
  • When a situation arises that the agreements do not cover, the team names the gap and decides together.
  • The agreements are treated as living documents, not historical artefacts.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Agreements that are aspirational but never enforced — they become cultural wallpaper.
  • Leaders who exempt themselves from the agreements they co-created.
  • Teams that create agreements under time pressure and never revisit them.
  • Agreements so specific they create bureaucracy rather than clarity.

5. Signals of Success

  • New team members onboard faster because the norms are explicit, not discovered through mistakes.
  • Conflict is addressed earlier because there is a shared reference point for expected behaviour.
  • The team self-manages cultural breaches — the leader is not always the one who names them.
  • Working agreement reviews are productive conversations, not administrative exercises.
  • The team's culture feels intentional, not accidental.