The seven elements of a Team Charter
A complete Team Charter addresses these core elements:
- Purpose: Why does this team exist? What would be missing if we weren't here?
- Goals: What are the 2–4 outcomes we are committed to delivering in this phase?
- Roles and responsibilities: Who does what? How are decisions made? What is each person's unique contribution?
- Working agreements: How do we communicate, meet, make decisions, and handle disagreement?
- Norms: What behaviors do we commit to? What behaviors are unacceptable on this team?
- Resources and constraints: What do we have to work with? What are our real limitations?
- Success metrics: How will we know we're doing well — both as a team and as individuals?
Preparation
01 · Schedule deliberately
- Hold the workshop at the team's formation, not weeks after work has already begun. Retroactively creating a charter is harder and less effective.
- Block 3–4 hours of uninterrupted time with no competing deadlines that day.
02 · Prepare the canvas
- Create a large shared template with sections for each charter element.
- Prepare sticky notes, markers, and a way to document decisions (digital or physical).
03 · Share pre-work
- Ask each participant to come with their answer to one question: "What would make this team genuinely great to be part of?"
- If there is a project brief or mandate, share it in advance so the workshop can focus on the team's response to it, not reading it for the first time.
Step-by-step instructions
1
Check-in (15–20 min)
- Each person briefly shares: their name, their role on this team, and one word that describes what they're bringing to this team right now.
- This grounds the session in the actual humans in the room, not just their job titles.
2
Purpose and goals (30–45 min)
- Individual reflection: "If this team is wildly successful in 12 months, what will we have achieved?" (5 min silent writing).
- Share and discuss. Draft a team purpose statement together: "We exist to [verb] [who] [outcome] so that [impact]."
- Define 2–4 concrete goals for the first phase of work.
3
Roles and responsibilities (30–45 min)
- Each person names their formal role and their informal contribution: "What I do here / What I bring that's hard to see."
- Identify 3–5 key team functions and who owns each one.
- Clarify decision-making: Which decisions does the team make together? Which does the lead make? Which can anyone make alone?
4
Working agreements (30–45 min)
- In pairs, brainstorm answers to: "For us to work well together, we need to agree on..." (5 min).
- Harvest the pairs' ideas and cluster them: communication, meetings, feedback, conflict, documentation, availability.
- For each cluster, propose a specific agreement and vote until you have 6–10 working agreements the whole team genuinely endorses.
- Include one agreement about what to do when agreements are broken.
5
Norms and culture (20–30 min)
- Ask: "What behavior would you notice if this was the best team you'd ever been part of?" and "What behavior would make you want to leave?"
- From these, distill 3–5 positive commitments ("We commit to...") and 2–3 clear boundaries ("We don't...").
6
Resources, constraints, and success (20–30 min)
- Name the team's real constraints honestly: budget, timeline, dependencies, gaps in expertise.
- Define how the team will measure its own health alongside external results: one process metric and one wellbeing check-in practice.
7
Sign-off and commitment (10–15 min)
- Read the charter aloud together.
- Each person makes a verbal commitment: "I'm in, and here's what I'll bring."
- Agree how the charter will be kept alive: reviewed quarterly, revisited when a new member joins, updated when major changes happen.
Materials
Team Charter canvas (physical large paper or digital template)
Sticky notes and markers
Project mandate or brief (if available)
A way to publish and share the final charter (shared drive, wiki, Notion)
Practical recommendations
The facilitator should not be the team lead
When the manager facilitates their own team's charter, people self-censor. Use a peer team member or external facilitator, or have the manager participate as an equal member rather than leading.
Name the real tensions
If two people have overlapping roles, name it. If there's a known constraint that will frustrate the team, put it on the table. Unspoken elephants invalidate the charter before it's finished.
Working agreements must be specific
"We communicate well" is not an agreement. "We respond to messages within 24 hours on weekdays and not at all on weekends" is.
Keep the charter alive
Review it at the start of each quarter, when a new member joins, and whenever the team hits a major rough patch. A charter that lives only in a folder has no power.
Quick-start version (90 min)
If time is short, focus only on Purpose, Top 3 Working Agreements, and Decision-Making protocol. You can build the rest in subsequent sessions.
Inspiration
Questions to deepen the working agreements conversation:
- How will we handle a missed deadline — who tells who, and how soon?
- What does "done" mean on this team?
- How do we disagree? What's acceptable and what's not?
- When someone is overwhelmed, how do they ask for help?
- How do we celebrate wins, and whose job is it to notice them?
- What's the one thing you need from this team to do your best work?
- What is the one behavior that would break trust for you?
