Why norms? Is this about that guy from Cheers?

No. Norms are about how we work together as a team and the culture we create as we get stuff done.

According to an often cited model by Bruce Tuckman, teams commonly go through five phases:

1. Forming - Bringing the team together, determining purpose, etc. The team must learn about each other and their purpose.

2. Storming - Conflicts can arise from disagreements over purpose, tasks, and even personalities.

3. Norming - The team resolves some of these differences and begins to work together in common. The team is able to set individual differences aside and achieve its goals..

4. Performing - Now the team is able to achieve needed outcomes without unnecessary conflict.

5. Adjourning - Once the team’s purpose is accomplished, the team disbands.

The purpose of this tool is to help you with the norming phase by creating agreement on how you will work together - the “norming” of a team. In this activity, we will focus on a tool to clarify three items in particular.

• How we communicate with each other

• How we communicate information to those outside the team

• How we are responsible for moving projects forward and accomplishing goals

To get the conversation started, I suggest you use a message like this one.

(And yes, you can copy and paste this one if that is helpful):

Hello All,

To help us excel as a team and hold each other accountable, we need to create some “norms” for how we work together. To help us create these as a team, I ask that you reply to this email with three suggested “norms” for each of the following categories:

How we communicate with each other

How we communicate information to those outside the team

How we are responsible for moving projects forward and accomplishing goals

Please offer your norm in the form of a concrete action/behavior.

For next steps, I will collate everyone’s suggestions into a master document that I can share previous to our next meeting. The document will include a list of everyone’s suggestions verbatim. For any suggestions that seem redundant, or speak to a common theme, I will synthesize these into one common norm, and offer that norm to the group in place of those it synthesizes.

During our next meeting, we can go over that list of norms one at a time and choose to do one of the following:

(1) Accept the norm as offered.

(2) Modify the norm to better reflect the will of the group.

(3) Reject the norm outright.

The resulting list will then serve as our mutually agreed upon norms.

As an action item, I ask that you reply to me with your list of (up to) 9 suggested norms by one week from today.

Here are a few pro tips for how you follow up:

• Use the exact words of the group as much as possible.

• Be sure to get assent from the group for each of the norms.

• Agree on how you will hold each other accountable for your team norms.

If you would like additional resources for facilitating your team’s norms, please contact me.