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CHAPTER 1

PART 1 BETTER BEGINNINGS

It's a beautiful Monday morning. Red and yellow leaves dance on the trees, and there's barely a cloud in the sky. People are jogging on the trails through a small park, their bodies haloed by the sun-at least, that's what you can see from the office window. You're stuck in a freezing conference room with a bunch of coworkers you don't know, listening to leaders you've never met explain exactly how important this upcoming project is for your company.

What do your team members think about this project? You leaf your way through the three-day kickoff agenda. It looks like you won't find out until late Wednesday. Your gaze wanders back to the window. You can almost feel the sun on your face, the cool breeze on your skin. Oh well. Maybe the boxed lunches will have those cookies you like.

New teams don't need to start this way. Except for the cookies, perhaps.

In the first weeks of working with a new team, you have to figure out why you're needed and what your personal contribution will be. You have to agree on which problems you're trying to solve together. You need to have a plan for how everyone will work together — from everyday communication to handling the things that could potentially go wrong (or right). And it would be nice to know a little more about the people you're working with and how you can best support each other.

When starting a project, we explicitly look for these things. Yet on so many teams, this information is absent. It can take weeks for team members to be fully invested in a project, and many more weeks to iron out issues that could have been handled from the start.

This is a shame, because patterns of team behavior are established at the beginning of any collaborative effort. The longer these behaviors persist, the harder it is to change them as a project moves along. While kickoff meetings are important for talking about team cohesion, they're also one of first opportunities to establish and model important behaviors for the team. This is even more critical when working with teams that bring people together from across different functions and cultures.

In the first part of this book, we'll share a series of rituals that help people set better expectations for how they want to work together, and make choices that bring them into alignment as a team. These rituals are best used in the first two weeks of starting a project, but they can also be used if a team starts to veer off course.

We'll close this part with rituals for planning a project kickoff with your teammates, so you can make the best use of everyone's time and expertise.

You'll find a lot of ideas here that your team can try. However, it's unlikely that any new project could accommodate all of these rituals before you dive into the work. Choose the ones that you think will best help your team and get going!

Start the Team by Talking about the Team

Unknown quantities. That's what we are to each other when we're starting on a team. We're sitting around the proverbial table, drinking our favorite coffee or tea, but none of these hot beverages will wash away our jitters. Who are these people? How do I want to work with them? And how are they going to best work with me? If these questions aren't answered right away, we start to make assumptions about what's best for ourselves and others — and those assumptions are usually wrong.

We encourage every team to conduct one of the following rituals before they kick off a project. By using these rituals in advance of formally starting projects, team members can get to know each other better as people, find shared points of connection, and begin to develop norms for how they want to work together before they feel the pressures of their work.

Because these rituals happen at the outset, this is the opportunity to clearly communicate to your future teammates the reasons why you're taking the time to conduct them. Likewise, after performing these rituals, be sure to conduct any necessary follow-up conversations before you prepare for the project kickoff.

RITUAL What Do We Bring to the Team?

Norms are common understandings about what is or isn't acceptable for a team in terms of behavior. Shared team norms include things like when employees show up to work or how team members want to communicate. Norms are part of our everyday interactions with coworkers, and they help shape the patterns of how work gets done.

At the start of a team project, many norms and their corresponding ways of working are unspoken. They aren't discovered until the team begins working together. It's important to formalize these unspoken norms as quickly as possible, and to let people choose which ones they want for the team. You can't always control the cultural norms and values that shape your workplace, but you can control what your team agrees to regarding how they want to work together.

This ritual is designed to help the team foster a shared picture of their skills, interests, and hobbies. It will also help them identify the areas in which they want to support each other over the course of the project. But the most important part of this ritual is when the team has their first discussion about their working norms.

This ritual is our adaptation of frog's "Skill Share" activity from the Collective Action Toolkit (of which we were both contributors) and frog's "Team Leap" (created by Tanya Khakbaz). We recommend using this ritual with teams that will be working together for up to three months. If you're working together for longer, the next ritual ("What Do We Value As a Team?") may be better suited to your team's needs.

1. Answer questions provided to the team

Ask your team members to answer the following questions on their own. They can either answer them at the start of the ritual, or these questions can be shared in advance of the meeting so people have time to prepare their responses.

What's your name and your role?

Tell us what you want to be called by the team, as well as your job title and role if we haven't worked together before.

What are your personal interests or hobbies?

Share what you feel comfortable letting the team know. Some teams work within organizations that discourage talk about personal lives. We've seen teams use this question to either create new behaviors around those conversations or to continue the practice by simply describing what people are interested in around the company's products or initiatives. Your team can decide how they want this to go.

What skills do you bring to the team?

Describe what skills you use as part of your job, plus those you want to share that aren't always used at work. This is where personal life skills may rise to the surface. In order to be effective in our professional lives, many of us draw from expertise that was not obtained "on the job." We rarely get the opportunity to express this knowledge. Now is your chance.

When do you prefer to work on your own?

Some work that happens on projects has to be done individually at first, then completed as a team. Which work tasks or situations do you prefer to tackle solo?

When do you prefer to work in collaboration with others on a team?

Be honest here. A simple story or two about situations you've been in on previous teams can be a good way to answer this question.

What do you want to learn while working on this team?

We have to get things done, but we've also got a great opportunity to learn from each other. This could be a personal or professional goal or just something you've been curious about.

If you want to add additional questions to this list, include some that relate your teammates' personal experiences to the subject matter of the project. For example, if the focus of your project is helping people manage their personal finances, you could include questions like "What was the best advice you received from a friend about money?"

2. Share answers with the team

Set up this ritual's diagram in a location that all of your team members can see. Ask each person to read out loud what they've written.

As they share about themselves, write their interests and hobbies in the first column, their skills in the second column, and what they want to learn in the third column. Don't label the information with the names of team members. If you have multiple coworkers with the same skill or interest, mark a star next to that information.

After everyone has spoken, describe to the team what you've discovered about everyone's skills and interests, noting both the unique skills and interests that individual people have, as well as any overlapping skills or interests. You might also identify skills the team doesn't have that are required for the project, which you can use as an input for project planning.

3. Create preferences for how you want to work together

Now that everyone has a sense of each other's skills and interests, ask each team member to list the norms they want to see for the team. For a workplace team, these norms fall into the following categories:

• When you want to work

• Where you want to work

• How you want to work

• What we'll learn from the work

Every team member should write a response for each of these norms on an individual sticky note. People can use their answers from the first set of questions as a starting point for this activity, especially if they spent a lot of time talking about when they prefer to work collaboratively or on their own. It's important to remind everyone that these are wants. They represent best-case work scenarios rather than "what I'm supposed to say to look like I'm dedicated" or "what I'll put up with." The viability of individual wants varies from culture to culture, but if you don't ask for what you want, you'll never be able to negotiate for it with your teams.

4. Share your individual preferences

Ask each person to share the individual norms that they've created.

When each person is done, place their suggestions on the diagram in the appropriate category.

5. Decide on your team's working norms

Now that everyone on your team has a shared understanding of each other's work preferences, you'll translate those preferences into shared norms for the team. Read through each category of work preferences. You're looking to make decisions as a team on what individual preferences should be translated into shared norms for the team. Identify where there are shared work preferences and where there are conflicting work preferences that may require trade-offs.

Our rule of thumb is this: Limit your team to six to eight norms and be specific in how you describe them. The more specific your norms, the easier it is to give each other feedback and hold each other accountable (refer to the sidebar for examples).

To complete this ritual, summarize for the team what decisions you've made. It can help to keep the summary in a similar visual format to the output of this ritual, so everyone on the team has a clear picture of what was discussed and the shared norms they've agreed to uphold.

Routine Do This Ritual Once, Use the Information Again

Reuse what each team member provided in terms of individual work preferences for when new people join your team or at future team kickoffs. Make sure that each person reviews their answers and updates them. Life circumstances and professional growth can change a coworker's preferences and priorities.

Routine Revisit Your Norms after You Start the Project

It will take a week or two for you to know if your team is capable of holding themselves to the shared norms they've established. Use the ritual "What Should We Change?" in Part 3, "Sprinting to the Finish," to revisit your norms and revise them based on what the team has discovered.

RITUAL What Do We Value as a Team?

If you want to reduce team misalignment from the start, close the gap between what people say they value and how they demonstrate those values through their everyday actions.

Words are powerful — so powerful that most of the problems we encounter are failures of vocabulary. We assume that everyone uses the same words and that they mean the same things to everyone.

For example, think about the word supportive. How do you see that word in how your team works together? How do your coworkers see it? Have you ever sat down with your team and talked about that? People see their values in behaviors, in what people do. But when people come together in teams, they typically revert to abstract or fluffy words to describe how they want to work and leave the specifics for later.

It usually isn't hard for team members to agree on what values are important to them: creative, innovative, collaborative. Within an hour or two of dialogue, most teams can find common ground and create basic working definitions to explain which values matter to them and why.

But from there, it can be hard for team members to be specific about what tangible behaviors they'll demonstrate as they put those values into action. Many teams say they value transparency or promise to be ethical or respectful, but when things go poorly, they use those words as weapons. They don't allow team members to address underlying behaviors. It's difficult to help each other improve as professionals when tough conversations start with "This team isn't creative enough" or "You don't respect me."

This ritual can help your team align and define behaviors that are unique to them. These behaviors will become your working norms as a team. We recommend using this activity with teams that will be working together for longer periods of time, from three months to several years. We also recommend periodically revisiting this ritual.

Values change slowly, but the ways that we express them can shift quickly.

To prepare for this activity, have a stack of index cards or sticky notes, as well as a whiteboard or a large sheet of paper on hand.

Although this ritual works best with physical notes or paper, a remote team can use a shared document to achieve the same results.

1. Identify your team's working values

Hand out sticky notes or index cards to your team members. Have them individually write down three words that describe how they like to work with others on a team. Some of the words that we see come up most frequently are:

If team members ask for formal definitions of the words, let them know that this activity is about how these words are defined by them individually, not by others on the team. How we personally define these terms, which is based on our own personal and professional histories, has a direct connection to how we recognize and embody these values.

2. Share your value words

Ask each person on your team to share their value words and explain why they chose them.

3. Decide on three values for your entire team

As a team, each person votes for three words that represent their most important values. The entire team has to agree on those three words. If you're facilitating this conversation, pay attention to the trade-offs the team makes as they narrow in on their chosen words. We don't always agree on what these terms mean. Talk about that!

4. Describe what behaviors you want from your teammates

Ask each person to take at least ten minutes to write down specific behaviors they would want to see from each other, if they were putting those three values into practice. Use the following questions as prompts:

If we say that we're VALUE WORD, what behaviors are we doing to show that?

This question helps people reflect on all of the different behaviors they currently have with their teams. It also helps them identify which of the more positive behaviors they want to continue using with their team.

If we want to be more VALUE WORD, what behaviors can we bring into our work?

These are new behaviors people want to introduce to the team. Since they aren't currently being displayed by team members, these behaviors may take more time and effort to put into practice.

Behaviors should be tangible actions that the team can reference as far as how the team communicates, collaborates, and gets their work done. Each behavior must be associated with a value word. Like the shared norm example in the previous ritual, behaviors should be specific enough that team members can say definitively whether they did or didn't do them.

For example, "I want us to give each other feedback on our work regularly" isn't specific enough, because regularly for one person might be every two days, while another team member thinks that once a month is fine. Instead, try: "We will meet every Thursday for an hour to share work in progress, and each team member will receive five minutes to provide focused feedback on how their work could be improved."

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Excerpted from "Turning People Into Teams"
by .
Copyright © 2018 David Sherwin and Mary Sherwin.
Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc..
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