How do you write a leadership team charter?

What is a leadership team charter?

A leadership team charter is a one-page agreement about how the team will work. It is not a mission statement for the organisation. It covers the team itself: what it is for, what it works on, who is in it and how members behave with each other.

Research on leadership team effectiveness explains why these topics matter. Hackman (2002) set out five conditions that make team success more likely. They are a real team, a clear and engaging direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organisational context and competent coaching. A later study of senior leadership teams named three essentials: a real team, a compelling direction and the right people (Wageman et al., 2008).

A charter puts the conditions the team can shape into words. Bang and Midelfart (2021) make a similar split in their model of effective management teams. They treat a clear team purpose, appropriate team tasks, the right composition and supportive organisational systems as separate factors.

What should a leadership team charter include?

Seven parts cover what most leadership teams need to agree. Keep each one short; the whole charter should fit on a page.

Team tasks and decision rights

This part decides what reaches the agenda. Wageman (2020) describes four legitimate uses of a leadership team: sharing information, giving advice, coordinating an initiative and making decisions together. She sees trouble when it is unclear which of these the team is doing. Marking each type of issue with one of the four makes that explicit.

Add who decides what. Some decisions belong to the team, some to one member after the team has advised, and some to the board. Writing this down saves the team from debating its own authority item by item.

Membership

Write the names down, even if it feels obvious. Hackman and colleagues studied more than 120 top teams. When they asked members to describe their team, fewer than 10% agreed on who was on it (Coutu, 2009).

One option is a core team that makes the team's decisions, with an extended group that joins for named items. For what research says about numbers, see leadership team size.

Working agreements

Norms form whether or not you write them. Feldman (1984) described several ways group norms develop. They include explicit statements by a leader or colleague, critical events in the group's history, what happens first, and habits carried over from elsewhere.

A written agreement is an explicit statement. Without one, early events and old habits are left to set the rules. Hackman made the same point about a team's start. The first time a group meets strongly shapes how it works for the rest of its life. That includes the norms members expect and enforce (Coutu, 2009).

Hackman warned that teams whose norms of conduct are vague or go unenforced always run into trouble (Coutu, 2009). So write norms as behaviour you can see. 'We read the papers before the meeting' can be checked. 'We respect each other' cannot.

Support

A team also depends on its context. Hackman argued that the organisation's reward, people and information systems must make teamwork possible (Coutu, 2009). Note what your team needs: data for its decisions, rewards that count shared results, and development for its members.

Do team charters actually help?

The evidence is encouraging, though it does not come from leadership teams. Mathieu and Rapp (2009) followed 32 teams of MBA students through a business strategy simulation. Teams with high-quality performance strategies outperformed the rest. The best sustained performance came from teams that had both a high-quality charter and a high-quality strategy.

The lesson is that a charter works best alongside a plan for the work itself. Agreeing how to work together is one half; agreeing how to tackle the task is the other.

A study of project teams from five large companies points the same way (Ericksen and Dyer, 2004). The three high-performing teams mobilised relatively quickly, and broadly rather than narrowly. They also held participatory launch meetings rather than scripted ones. The three low performers slid into confusion and inactivity from which they never recovered.

Both studies are small, and neither looked at senior teams. Still, they fit a wider pattern in team research. Hackman and Wageman (2005) argue that coaching has most effect at particular times in a team's work. Hackman named the launch, the midpoint and the end (Coutu, 2009).

How do you write a team charter together?

Write it with the whole team, in one or two sessions. A charter the leader writes alone tells members what to do. A charter they write together is one they have agreed to.

Drafting alone matters. In brainstorming experiments, people who worked alone and pooled their ideas produced more than groups talking together. The main cause was waiting for a turn to speak (Diehl and Stroebe, 1987). Private drafts also put every member's view on the table before the discussion starts.

The leader still has a distinct role. Hackman noted that setting a team's direction involves authority, and the responsibility can fall to the leader (Coutu, 2009). Some parts, such as membership, may be the leader's call. Say which parts are open for discussion before you start.

If the team has not yet agreed what it is for, start there. The article on the purpose of a leadership team sets out the questions to ask.

What does a sample leadership team charter look like?

The outline below is an illustration, not a real team's charter. Replace each line with your team's own words.

How do you keep a team charter alive?

Use it every time you set an agenda. Before an item goes on, ask whether it belongs to the team and which of the four uses it serves. If it does not belong, send it to a one-to-one, a smaller group or a written update.

For how to turn the charter into a working agenda, with outcomes and time boxes, see leadership team meeting agenda.

Review it at least once or twice a year, and whenever members join or leave. Hackman pointed to the midpoint of a team's work as a moment to review what is working and correct course (Coutu, 2009). For a standing leadership team, a half-yearly review can play a similar role.

Bring it into the room. Read the purpose aloud at the start of a strategy session, or check one working agreement at the end of each meeting. A charter that nobody quotes has stopped working.

What are the most common mistakes with team charters?

What can you do this month?

• Ask each member to write, alone, one sentence on why the team exists. Compare the sentences at your next meeting.
• List the issues that came to the team last quarter, and mark each one: decide, coordinate, advise or inform.
• Ask everyone to name the members of the team. If the lists differ, settle membership first.
• Agree three working agreements you can observe, and check them at the end of the next three meetings.
• Put a review date in the calendar before the session ends.