Team Charter: What to Include in a Company Roadmap
Written by MasterClass
Last updated: May 17, 2022 • 4 min read
Team charters act as roadmaps for high-performing teams in all sorts of different industries. They crystallize a team’s purpose, lay out the basic ground rules of internal engagement, and set a blueprint for the team’s success in both the short and long term. Learn more about how to create a team charter you can rely on to power truly meaningful and effective work.
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What Is a Team Charter?
A team charter is a document departments use to clearly outline a team’s essential nature and requisite duties. It’s a North Star of sorts for groups looking to better define their basic mission, long-term goals, and daily operations.
When a team brainstorms their charter as a unit, each member can better understand their role as an individual as well as how they contribute to the whole of the group’s mission. This facilitates more effective team communication as a whole and makes accomplishing daily tasks easier.
Why Use a Team Charter?
Team charters provide both old and new team members with a firm idea of how they can help their coworkers succeed. In a group setting, lay the groundwork for project success by carefully crafting specific metrics for task completion and specifically defining each person’s unique role.
Team charters also help facilitate greater team-building by getting everyone aligned on goals in both the immediate and distant future. Think of team charters as constitutions—founding documents meant to clarify a group’s purpose and bylaws as clearly as possible.
7 Elements to Include in an Effective Team Charter
Team charters assist with both facilitating effective project management and promoting team cohesion. These seven elements serve as the basic features of any team charter template:
- 1. Broader context: To truly clarify a team’s purpose, situate your charter within the broader framework of your organization as a whole. It’s likely your team is only pursuing some of the initiatives needed by your company—in other words, your group will have just one team or project charter of many. By considering the broader context of what your organization needs and how it plans to achieve its goals, you can better define your team’s part in the wider company is specifically.
- 2. Chain of command: Every team has an internal structure—a chain of command defining who has ultimate decision-making powers and who provides final sign-off on specific tasks. You might decide to funnel everything up to a single team leader or delegate aspects of team direction to an array of different people. In either case, establish a clear and common sense hierarchy to make managing projects and staying on track more possible for everyone.
- 3. Daily operations: Team charters look at both the long-term goals and daily tasks of a group’s workflow. In your team charter, specify a time frame in which everyone should send over all their deliverables, as well as check-ins and milestones along the way to ensure everyone stays on course. Rather than getting too into the nitty-gritty of all your real-time team operations here, simply provide a basic outline for how individuals should go about their day-to-day tasks. Consider utilizing apps or software specially designed for more granular project management after you lay out the basics in your charter.
- 4. Ground rules: Teams need basic ground rules as much as they need measurable goals to succeed. To foster effective team collaboration, start brainstorming about what’s necessary to complete projects in a timely manner. For instance, decide what tasks might require a team meeting versus which might require just an email. Ground rules like these help everyone be respectful of everybody else’s time.
- 5. Mission statement: Situate all your project team goals within the context of your team’s mission statement. When you understand your team’s core values, it’s easier to clarify how you can best translate those values into actionable items for individual team members. When designing a mission statement, consider both the makeup of your team and the nature of the project as a whole. A good team charter mission or vision statement takes into account the distinct personality of a team and broader company needs.
- 6. Resources and support: Most teams are subsets of a larger organization, so explaining the allocation of duties from one team to the next as well as any additional resources any given team can expect access to can prove helpful. Elucidate how your team can achieve integration with others. List all the ways your distinct group can tap into your organization’s resources as a whole to achieve team success.
- 7. Roles: All members of the team need to know how you expect them to utilize their distinct skill sets. Effective teamwork requires every individual to understand how they fit into the whole of the team structure. Carefully enumerate the duties and daily tasks of each stakeholder. Clarify the relationships among team members as well.
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