The Team Agreements:
Guidelines for effective team functioning.
Explicit behavioral agreements that guide interpersonal interaction and collaborative problem-solving.
Shared expectations for communication, feedback, and conflict management.
Functioning as structural support by promoting transparency, accountability, and psychological safety within teams.
No single team member holds absolute truth. Every position contains a kernel of validity — and synthesis is the goal of disagreement, not victory. When perspectives conflict, we look for what each position gets right before we assess what either gets wrong.
No one person has all the answers — and no one person should be expected to. When uncertain, team members bring the problem to the team rather than going it alone. Consultation is not a sign of weakness. It is the structural practice that makes better decisions possible.
Team members will differ from each other — in their approaches, their responses, their thresholds. That is expected, and it is acceptable. We don't have to agree on how to handle every situation, and we don't have to tailor our behavior to match everyone else's. Diversity of approach is not a problem to resolve. It's a condition to respect.
Different people have different limits — and those limits are legitimate. What one person can absorb, another may not be able to. The team agrees to respect limits rather than pathologize them, and to communicate clearly when limits have been reached.
Before attributing negative intent, we look for interpretations that are both charitable and grounded — ones that make sense given what the other person is experiencing. We ask: given their context, their history, and their current regulatory capacity, how does this behavior make sense? Non-pejorative means we don't lead with blame. Phenomenologically empathic means we try to see it from inside their experience. That combination changes what's possible in the conversation that follows.
We will make mistakes. We will miss things. We will have moments where our own regulatory capacity falls short. That is expected — and it doesn't make anyone a failure. What matters is that we return to the work with honesty, apply the same assumptions to ourselves that we apply to the leaders we develop, and try again.