Establish Norms for How Your Team Will Work Together

By Sabina Nawaz for Harvard Business Review | May 30, 2018

Is your team struggling to work well together? Perhaps a few people dominate your meetings, or team members constantly revisit past decisions. If so, create norms about how you’ll work with one another. Start by looking at past team experiences to identify norms that have made the team more productive and effective, and then break down the norms into specific behaviors. For example, a norm might be equal participation in meetings, and the behavior might be going around the room and soliciting input from everyone on key issues, starting with the person who’s spoken the least. Discuss how team members will hold one another accountable if someone violates the norm. Establishing team norms in this way, and sticking to them, will increase trust, save time, and improve performance.

Adapted from “How to Create Executive Team Norms — and Make Them Stick,” by Sabina Nawaz