Hello Reader
In the last newsletter, I talked about meetings and how to make the best of them. This newsletter is the first part of a 2 part series on teams. Most leaders think hiring the right people and putting them together will make teams work. The issue is that there is no clear goal or direction, and many teams struggle with the internal mechanics that make teams hum or crash. The first thing to work on is: what is the internal structure of your team?
Your team has an internal structure. Nobody designed it.
The beliefs, systems, values, rituals, and meetings that hold a team around one direction rarely get built on purpose. They accumulate with whatever the last manager left behind, plus whatever the current one has patience for.
That works until the team hits something hard, and everyone finds out they were running on different assumptions the whole time. There is a sequence that makes it deliberate, and here are the four steps, in order.
Alignment comes before agreement,
Start with why. The Drexler-Sibbet model is a good place to begin because it asks the questions people are already carrying quietly:
- Why are we all here?
- Do we trust each other?
- What are we actually doing?
- What am I committing to?
Working through these does not produce the document, as that is not the goal. It produces shared orientation and a common understanding. That is the ground everything else stands on. Skip it, and you get a team charter that reads like it was written by a committee that never met.
Output: shared orientation.
Canvases are for thinking, not for shipping
Two proven canvases hold the raw material.
The team agreement from Management 3.0 covers values, communication, collaboration, decisions, conflict, data, hours, and motivation. The team canvas from Dandy People covers roles, competences, principles, ceremonies, definition of done, stakeholders and goals.
Here is the caution, and it matters more than either canvas: you are using them to think. Do not try to complete all of it. I have watched teams complete both, feel productive about it, then try to publish the whole thing as their operating agreement. Nobody reads a twenty-field canvas twice.
Caution: fill these to think. Do not ship all of it.
You cannot schedule the moment a team actually agrees
Keep iterating on one question: what do we want to be like as a team? At some point there is a thunk. A sudden connection where everyone recognizes the same thing at the same moment. We all agree to this.
I call it the thunk because that is what it sounds like: a door closing properly on the first try.
You cannot manufacture it, and you cannot put it in the calendar. You can only keep circling the question until it arrives. When it does, the quality of agreement in the room changes from compliance into something people will defend when it gets tested.
Output: real agreement, not compliance.
If it runs past four sentences, nobody will remember it
Two to four sentences. That is the entire document.
Put it on a Post-it. Frame it on the wall. Send it in a Monday email. Pin it in the channel. All of the above, because the real test is friction. People will not hear it the first time or understand it the second. They are busy doing the work the agreement is meant to support. Make it easy to find and it gets a chance.
Output: something people can actually recall.
Lightweight enough to create, structured enough to rely on
Two failure modes sit either side of this work. Too little structure and the team has nothing to orient around. Too much and the process eats the energy people need for the work itself.
Land it lightweight enough that the team still creates, takes chances, and tries things. Structured enough that people know when they meet and what to expect from each other.
That balance point moves depending on the team, which is why the sequence matters more than any single output.
If the team is already succeeding, leave them alone
Two things worth saying plainly to managers.
If the thunk is not the one you wanted, guide the team gently toward the one you did. That is a legitimate part of the role, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
And if the team is succeeding anyway, let them do what they do. Not every group needs you to formalize what is already working.
Get a horizontal version here.
Part 2 covers what happens when the agreement meets reality, and you have multiple teams, which is where the interesting work lives.
One question before then. Has your team ever had a thunk, a feeling of agreement and understanding, and what was in the room that made it possible? Reply and tell me. I read every one.
Yours,
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