Winning at Work: Using Team Charters to Boost Effectiveness

When working in teams, students and employees often don’t allow for adequate preparation time before beginning the team’s tasks. Instead of immediately jumping to the task at hand, it is recommended that the team first create a team charter. A team charter will detail members’ mutual expectations about how the team will operate, allocate resources, resolve conflict, and meet its commitments. Creating a team charter should include identifying member strengths, setting goals, agreeing on processes for communication and decision making, and deciding how to measure and use contributions from members. Effective team charters have a mission statement, provide a statement of team vision, create a team identity, establish boundaries and operating guidelines, describe the team’s performance norms and consequences, and have been endorsed by all team members.

Discussion Questions/Topics:

• What would be the benefits of developing a team charter as part of a group project in this class or another class you are taking?
• What would be the difficulties in creating a team charter for a group project for an online class?
• An old adage is “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Describe a time you saw this happen in a team of which you were a member, either at school or at work.