So in this session we've talked a lot about team structures. We've talked about formal team structures, departmentation, centralization, reward structures, virtual team structures. We've talked about informal team structures, roles and norms. The last thing I wanna share with you is the importance of establishing what we call a Team Charter. That really helps define those roles, norms, expectations, rewards, processes, etc. Helps define those elements of your team design. So this is really the document that brings together everything that we've talked about in terms of team design, composition, goals, as well as the formal and informal structures. This is the document that says, as a team, we have a shared understanding of how we have designed ourselves as a team, and how we're going to work together. That will then feed into many of the conversations that we have and Maxim will lead you through, about team processes, managing conflict, developing trust cohesion. Those sorts of team processes. Once you have this charter document, you're much more effective at managing those processes so that you're able to deliver a high set of results or a high level of performance. So again, team charter is simply a formal document written down that specifies team roles, norms, expectations, processes, rewards, and sanctions or the punishments. And so I've given you a list of the specific elements that often find their way into team charter documents here ranging from goals, roles, and responsibilities. Timelines, key milestones, different expectations and norms related to meetings, attendance, how we're going to communicate with each other, norms and protocols about giving and receiving feedback, and the different rewards that you're going to use as a team for performance, and what some of the sanctions might be if people don't deliver or perform at the level that the team expects. Again, formal document. It takes time up front, but what we find is the teams who invest that time benefit a great deal from the investment in developing this team charter. Online, we will share with you some example templates of charters that you can use for your own purpose. And you can feel free to adapt those as you see fit. But you'll see that they have many of these elements in there. But again, it's just a formal document. It's really not as much about the document. It's much more about the process of your team working together to create it. Which forces a dialogue and discussion about some of these issues that we've highlighted and talked about with respective team design. But if you don't believe me let me reinforce with some data. The impact that this team chartering process has on performance. So here's a study that one of my good friends and colleagues, John Matthew, has published in the Journal of Applied Psychology looking at teams performance over time. And so I've modeled here 8 rounds, or segments of team performance over time. And so in this study, John and colleagues were assessing team performance over time at each of the different segments. And so I've modeled the trajectory of teams' performance over time. And in this study, looked at two different aspects. One was the quality of the charter that the team develops. All teams in this study had a team charter, but some of the teams really invested in that charter, really took it seriously, spent time with it, were very clear in their documentation of goals, roles, norms, processes, and so on. Other teams were not as clear or as detailed, or as thorough about developing that team charter. So the teams that really invested and did a high quality job with the charter, that's what you see here as high charter. Low charter would be the opposite. The teams that, the quality of their team charter was just less so than the other teams. And then the other dimension here is the teams' task strategies. So all of these teams performed a similar task, and some teams had what we evaluated as a really effective strategy for how to accomplish the task, and some teams did not. And so I'm showing you these data because, I want you to see is that the charter can actually help make up for an ineffective strategy. So for example, not too surprising, when teams have a really high quality charter and a high quality performance strategy, not surprisingly they start to improve pretty quickly and their performance continues to improve over time and by the end they are performing really, really well. Now when they have a low quality charter, and a low quality strategy. Not too surprising. They start to underperform relative to other teams quickly and their performance continues to decline over time. Not too surprising. But what happens when a team does not have an effective performance strategy. Because in today's day and world, we don't know oftentimes whether our strategies for accomplishing a team task are good or not. And so I'm fascinated by these data on what happens when we have a performance strategy that is not a high quality strategy for that given task. What happens to the team if we have a high quality charter because remember that charter is going to establish goals, roles, norms, expectations about how we as a team are going to operate together. Which, as we discover that our strategy is ineffective, the chances of us being able to identify that we have an ineffective strategy, learn from that experience, and adapt and be flexible as a team is much greater if we have invested the time upfront to clarify those roles, norms, expectations and so forth. And that's exactly what we find. So what you see here in the dark navy blue bar, is the team that has a high charter, low quality strategy. So they've got the high quality charter, lower strategy. They start to perform quite well, but their performance does not decline nearly as much if they didn't have that low quality charter. That high quality charter enables them to still perform almost just as well as the team who had no charter, but a really effective performance strategy. Okay. Clearly best of both worlds high quality charter, high quality performance strategy, that's where we want to be. But if we can't be there, the one thing we can absolutely control is our investment in the chartering process. And what we're finding in our research is if you will take the time to invest in the chartering process even if your performance strategy is not optimal. You'll still improve in terms of your performance and deliver at a higher level. Really interesting data. So again, invest in your performance strategies. Very important. But also take the time, make the investment to invest in your chartering for the team to set clear roles, clear boundaries, clear expectations, clear norms, goals, processes, timelines, milestones, etc. Use the templates that we've given you. This is one study. We've got another study that we've done where I won't show you the full set of data but here's the conclusion from the study. Our results simply support the assertion that the introduction of team charters do, in fact, manifest in improved intermediary process outcomes, team processes, communication, effort, support, and cohesion. You take the time to invest in the chartering process, and the communication, the support, the cohesion benefits are extremely clear and beneficial for your team's performance over time. So, take the time. Invest in your performance strategies, but spend an equal amount of time investing in that team charter up front.
