Open, Honest, and Direct
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If you are not running your organization and are a leader of a team, big or small, the activity does not change for you, although the perspective may shift. You’ll be creating agreements for your team, business unit, or working group. The agreements are unique to you and your team and don’t have to be the same as your company’s values. The agreements you’ll be coming up with are the ways in which your team needs to work together to be at its best. These are fluid and may change as you add team members or as your team’s objectives change. As you begin this activity, let go of the need to match these agreements to the values of your company, and start thinking about what your team needs so it can operate at its best.
Step 1: Draft your rules of the game
Team agreements are made between you and your employees about how you will work with one another. They’re important because they establish what’s OK, what’s not OK, and what you can expect from one another. Having a set of common norms gives your employees clarity and also provides a structure for them to feel psychologically safe.
In concept, team agreements are a great idea. But in execution, they’re hard to establish. For starters, we aren’t always clear on what we want and expect from our team. The most effective way to establish these team agreements is to start by pulling all our ideas together. We’ll begin by creating three lists: a list of your expectations, a list of your personal values, and a list of values from other organizations you admire. As we begin the process, I encourage you to write down as much as possible in the early part of this brainstorm. What we are doing is gathering all of our ideas, without judging them as good or bad. Once we have all our ideas captured, we’ll narrow down the ideas into a few core team agreements.
When you’re leading a team, you have expectations for each member, for the goals you are trying to reach, the way to meet these goals, and the dynamics of the team. Some of these expectations are clear, like the goals you have for the team or the key performance indicators (KPI)—for example, we know we need to close $3.5 million in sales this quarter. Some expectations exist that we’ve never shared with our team members. Other expectations exist, but we’re not aware of them—these can lead to confusion. Today we’ll start by uncovering some of these expectations that we have but might not be so aware of.
Creating team agreements
To create effective agreements with your team, you’ll start by creating a few lists: your expectations of your team, your personal values, and the values other than your own that you respect or believe are important for your team to work together successfully.
List 1: Your expectations
Start by creating a list of all the expectations you have of your direct reports. To help you come up with your list, write down two or more bullets for each question below.
1. How do you know this person is a rock star on your team?
Examples
• He tells me when he’s behind on a deliverable before the deadline has passed.
• She asks for help when she needs it.
• He is unafraid to challenge ideas of others, including me.
• She takes risks and is willing to make mistakes.
2. How do you know they’re not a fit for your team?
Examples
• He thinks he knows all the answers.
• She makes the same mistakes over and over again.
• She doesn’t set deadlines for her deliverables.
• He blames others for his mistakes.
3. What is one thing people on your team do (or one person does) that pisses you off?
Examples
• Show up late to meetings.
• Don’t have an agenda prepared for a meeting.
• Don’t do what they say they will do.
• Need to be told the same thing ten times to make one change.
4. What expectations do you have that you haven’t explicitly shared with your team?
Examples
• Before you say something won’t work, do the work and test your assumptions.
• Assume everyone on our team is working together to get to the best possible outcome; no one is trying to intentionally harm you.
• Don’t just identify problems; come to me with a plan to solve the problem, even if it’s as simple as brainstorming a solution together.
As you do this, list any and all expectations you have of your team. There’s no judgment of the expectations. This is filling the top end of the funnel, and these expectations are meant to serve as idea generators for your team agreements.
A lack of clarity about your expectations is your blind spot for establishing open, honest, and direct communication with your team. Getting clear about our expectations, conscious and unconscious, helps us be clearer and, therefore, more open, honest, and direct in our communication. Confusion can arise when we’re not 100% aware of what’s going on in our minds, including the expectations we have of others. This step is designed to help bring those expectations to the forefront of your mind so you can start the process of creating how you want your team to meet them.
List 2: Your personal values
A personal value is a descriptor of who you are at your core. Once everything circumstantial is stripped away from you, your personal values are what remain. Regardless of how much money you have, how successful you are, or what stage you are in of your life, your values are the core traits that are always true about you. When we honor our values, we feel accomplished and fulfilled. When we disregard our values, we feel frustrated, upset, and unfulfilled. Your personal values are who you are when you’re at your best.
The hard thing about defining your personal values is not that you have to go somewhere to find them; they are and have always been inside of you. Personal values are hard to define because there are no real words that can accurately describe who you are. However, this shouldn’t stop you from attempting to get close.
ACTIVITY: FIVE WORDS TO DESCRIBE YOU
At the top of a piece of paper, write down the words “I am . . .” Then, close your eyes, put your left hand on your stomach and your right hand on your heart, feeling it beating, pumping blood to all the vital organs in your body. Take a deep breath in, slowly inhaling for five seconds, holding for one and releasing for five. Repeat this for five breaths. After the fifth breath, open your eyes and write down any words to describe yourself. Don’t think; just write the first words that come to your mind.
If you pause, you are likely thinking about the words to describe yourself instead of letting them come from within, from your core. If this happens, stop, even if you’re only at one word.
Share your list with a close friend, a family member, and a coworker. Ask them to share their opinion on the accuracy of these words describing you and whether they feel the urge to offer a word or two that were missed. You can choose to add their words to your list or not. These words are yours.
Here are mine as a thought starter for you.
I am. . .
• Loving
• Caring
• Funny
• Honest
• Courageous
In listing your values, you’ll gain more clarity on who you are at your core. It will not be a surprise, then, that you are at your best in a situation or environment where you are able to express these values freely. On the other hand, the times you get the most frustrated are usually a result of a personal value of yours being suppressed or violated.
Although this activity seems more personal than the others so far, it’s crucial to your success as a leader. If you’re clear on your personal values, on what fills you up and makes you tick, it will be easier to express this to others, to anticipate it coming, and to plan your team agreements in a way that serves you. If your agreements don’t serve you, how will you be able to serve and lead your team effectively?
List 3: Values you admire
Finally, make a list of values that your company currently holds and ones you like from other companie
s that aren’t already on list 2. What’s the old saying? The best compliment you can give is by taking someone else’s idea and building on it. That’s how I want you to think about this list. It’s where you can look at other team agreements you’ve seen from brands you like, from competitors you admire, and from mentors you look up to. There are great team agreements all around us, so take a moment to write down your favorites now.
Drafting your team agreements
At this point, you have three lists: a list of your expectations for how your employees should work together, a list of your personal values, and a list of values from your company or others that you admire and may want to include. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, these activities are about gathering all possible ideas that may be needed to lead your team. Now what we are going to do is narrow down our ideas from all the lists to come up with your team agreements.
Look back at your three lists and circle the five most important values and expectations. Narrowing down from dozens to five or less won’t be easy. The question I want you to focus on when narrowing down your list, when deciding which expectation to keep and which value to let go of, is this: What agreements are most important for my team to perform at its best?
If you lead one team but not the entire organization, your decision can and will be unique to your team. The agreements you choose don’t need to be shared by the organization as a whole. Your team has a unique mix of people, with you as their leader and its own objectives within the organization.
It’s OK if you want to combine some and if some overlap. Stick to five or fewer. The fewer agreements you end up with, the easier it will be to share with your team, to have them remember, and to hold each other accountable. If you have twenty, you diminish the importance of each agreement. If you have only five agreements, each becomes critical to success as a team.
Defining success
With your agreements in hand, it’s critical to define what success looks like for each of them, to be clear about what actions and behaviors match the agreement. Each agreement should have two or three sub-bullets outlining how you will know if an employee is embodying these agreements. By taking the time to define success, you convert an idea that’s clear in your head to specific actions that your employees can clearly understand and follow. If you want to keep it as simple as possible and only have a word or phrase with no definitions of success, you’ll find quickly that doing the right thing may mean something different to an employee than it does to you. For each agreement, ask yourself how you will know if an employee is exhibiting this agreement. What would success look like? What actions would he or she take? This last step is crucial: The more specific you are, the easier it will be for you to hold your employees accountable to the agreements.
On my team, embracing a beginner’s mind is one of our agreements. Employees who successfully honor this agreement ask tough questions, challenge the status quo, and are curious to find out what they don’t know about a given situation.
Here’s a full example of what our team agreements look like at Raise The Bar. Notice how each has a detailed set of descriptors, which make it easy for me to hold any team member accountable to the agreement and easy for them to keep me in check too.
Open, honest, and direct communication in a team setting is triggered when we are clear about our agreements for how we work with one another. By gaining clarity of what the agreements are, we are ready to communicate them directly to our team.
Step 2: Turn your agreements into action
After you’ve clearly defined your team agreements, the next step is to gain alignment with your team. This is important because the agreements are meant to be used by you and your team, not just by you. The hard thing here will be to realize that although the values or expectations were originally yours and you created the agreements, they are not actually yours. They will become actions you and your team need to agree on as the best ways to work together. It’s important to think of the team as a whole and to think of the purpose of the agreements. You’re going to need your team to buy in to them too, and buy-in comes much easier when individuals are able to be involved in the decision-making process. Although you may provide the initial motivation or inspiration, the process will work best if it’s a team or joint effort.
One of my clients, David, a sales leader at a Fortune 500 company, learned this the hard way. He did the work of getting clear on his expectations, refined his personal values, and compared them with company values to develop a set of team agreements he was proud of. He enthusiastically shared the agreements with me, and they were good—clean, concise, and action oriented, just what you’d want in your agreements.
David decided to have a little fun with how he rolled them out to his team. As a sales team, they constantly worked in and with contracts—so that’s what he did. He put the agreements into a contract, presented them to the team, and had them sign it. The only problem was this: The team didn’t agree to David’s agreements. There was no room to budge or change anything on the agreements, because they had already been typed out in contract form. Instead of bringing levity to the activity, David brought the opposite: a level of seriousness and tension. Instead of the laughs and sense of unity he’d anticipated, he received silence and realized he’d created a disconnect with his team by leaving them out of the process. Ultimately, the team agreements flopped; and dejected, David gave up on them.
I share his experience as a cautionary tale to help remind you of the importance of ceding the ownership of team agreements to your team when you roll them out. It’s critical to show that your agreements are simply a first draft of what you think the team needs in order to operate and function at its best. You need your team’s input and contribution to not only make these valuable agreements but also to get everyone on board with the way to move forward together.
David’s story also highlights the importance of giving your team time to digest the agreements and upcoming changes. By the time you share your agreements with the team, you’ll have spent far more time thinking about these expectations than they have. People need time to absorb new information and won’t be ready to fully commit to a new way of working right away, even if they say they are. Give them time to think through the information, and don’t ask them to sign anything right away. Instead, invite them to reflect on what each agreement means to them and to come prepared to the next team meeting to discuss them. Through this discussion, you can ensure that you and your team are aligned.
Just because you’ve defined a set of team agreements doesn’t mean everyone on your team will suddenly be open, honest, and direct with each other. You now have to turn these agreements into actions by making deals with the team. This means you achieve alignment on the actions that demonstrate the fulfillment of an agreement. When you and your team align on the agreement and the actions that define the agreement, you have a deal. At that point, you’ve turned your agreements into actions.
David had a second crack at rolling out his agreements with a new team a few months ago. He made sure to start by getting their buy-in first, and it worked out much smoother for him and the team.
Here are a few steps to getting aligned:
• Schedule two meetings.
• Whiteboard your drafted agreements.
• Share the meaning of each agreement.
• Encourage your team to ask clarifying questions.
• Follow up in writing.
• Make deals as a team.
Schedule two meetings
In the first meeting, provide your team with context. Share the purpose of the team agreements and then roll out your drafted agreements, allowing your team to ask questions and challenge the agreements. In the second meeting, you’ll make deals with your team.
Whiteboard your drafted team agreements
Rather than printing out your agreements, write them out on a whiteboard to show their flexibility; you want to communicate that the agreements can easily be erased and
rewritten. This will help people on your team feel like an active part of the brainstorming and creation process rather than passive followers of your agreements.
Share the meaning of each agreement
What does each agreement mean to you, and how do you define success? That’s the bullet list you created for each agreement. Adding in stories highlighting how a team member held the agreement is a great way to make these actions more tangible for your team.
Encourage your team’s involvement
Encouraging your team to ask clarifying questions provides the opportunity for them to challenge the agreements if they don’t make sense to them, to dig into each one, and to truly understand what they mean.
Follow up in writing
Send the agreements in a follow-up email, asking people to come prepared to your next team meeting ready to align on the agreements as a team.
Make deals as a team
At meeting two, ask the team if they can commit to demonstrating these behaviors. If they align with the agreements, ask them to commit to exhibiting each behavior. If they can’t commit, seek to understand their perspective, and work toward aligning on a revision or new commitment instead. Continue the discussion until all of the agreements are committed to by all of the team members.