Team Norms: What They Are And How To Establish Them
Every team operates using a set of norms—the informal expectations for how members collaborate. Simply put, they’re understood as “The way that work gets done around here”.
Team norms develop organically over time, and are often unwritten and unspoken, but I’ve found that deliberately establishing and communicating team norms helps elevate team performance and engagement.
Here I’ll take you through the power of team norms and provide a guide for how to establish them.
By shifting to intentionally creating explicit norms, leaders can help propel their teams to higher performance.
What Are Team Norms?
Norms are not the same as rules or guidelines. They differ in several important ways.
Level of formality
Typically, norms are informal, unwritten agreements that help dictate how team members will work together. They are the traditionally uncodified rules for how work gets done on the team, but it is possible and preferable for the team to create and communicate them while still keeping them informal in nature.
On the other hand, rules and guidelines are formal and documented, often in the form of policies or standard operating procedures.
Flexibility
Norms are flexible and fluid and can easily adapt and evolve as the team or situation changes without formal approval.
Rules and guidelines are more rigid. Due to their formal nature, they require approval from leadership to be changed.
How they are created
Norms are shaped collectively through team interactions and experiences whereas rules and guidelines are developed and imposed by someone in authority (a leader, functional group, or the organization).
Scope
Norms focus on how people work together in a specific context. They are situational to a team or group and are not consistent across the organization.
Rules and guidelines have a broader scope and are generally consistently applied to the whole organization.
Accountability and enforcement
Norms are self-enforced and rely on mutual accountability. Lack of compliance is addressed through feedback and discussion with no formal penalty.
Rules/guidelines are enforced by a person or function in authority. Lack of compliance often has formal consequences.
| Norms | Rules/Guidelines |
| Often informal and unwritten | Formal and documented |
| Highly adaptable | Rigid; can only be changed with leadership approval |
| Shaped collectively through team interaction and experience | Created by leadership and imposed by someone in authority |
| Focus on how people work together in certain contexts; situational | Have broad scope; invariable |
| Self-enforced; enforcement relies on mutual accountability | Enforced by someone in authority; enforcement has formal consequences |
The Importance Of Norms For High-Performing Teams
Norms help to foster high performance by providing the shared understanding needed for teams to operate efficiently and collaborate effectively.
They orient the team towards shared goals and accountability, helping to reduce the noise of competing priorities.
Establishing team norms helps to create an effective working dynamic in three important ways:
1. Consistent expectations and behavior
To perform at a high level, teams require consistency. By establishing not just what people do on the team but how they do it, norms help to drive focus and productivity and eliminate the need to decide how work will get done for every project or workstream.
Norms create consistent expectations for how team members collaborate, make decisions, and communicate with one another—all of which reduce the ambiguity and conflict that can bog teams down.
2. Increased trust and collaboration
In its famous Project Aristotle study, Google determined that the number one determining factor of a high-performing team is psychological safety—essentially the level of trust in the team.
Norms accelerate trust building and mutual accountability by outlining the expected behaviors around keeping commitments to the team, taking responsibility for mistakes, and working together to problem solve.
3. Clarity for prioritization
When team members have shared goals and an understanding of how their individual areas of accountability support those goals, everyone is able to prioritize based on the same shared factors.
They help people focus their time and energy on the most important projects and decisions and eliminate confusion around the highest priorities for delivering results.
Examples Of Team Norms
While teams can create norms around various aspects of their collaboration, here are some examples of the most common types of norms.
1. When and how the team communicate
Establishing shared expectations of how and when the team communicates, both internally and externally to cross-functional partners, is essential to ensuring clarity and productivity. This can include:
- Use of communication channels: When and how the team uses email vs. instant messaging vs. meetings vs. town halls
- Response times: Expected time frames for responding to urgent vs non-urgent messages, etc.
- Urgency: How to communicate when something is urgent and what constitutes urgency.
- Transparency of information: How transparent the team is with information across various levels of the team and organization.
- Meetings expectations: Who gets invited to meetings, use of agendas, expectations for recaps, and cascading information.
2. How decisions are made on the team
Having a shared understanding of how decisions are made and communicated increases clarity and accountability.
It ensures that decisions are made efficiently and that team members understand their role in the process. Some common norms around decision-making include:
- Use of specific decision-making frameworks: Using tools like SWOT analysis, a decision matrix, RAPID, or RACI.
- Clarity on the decision maker: When the team makes decisions collectively, when the decision is made by the leader, and when the decision is delegated to someone else on the team.
- Data-driven decisions: Expectations of when to use data as opposed to opinions and how much data is required to make decisions.
- Revisiting decision: Criteria for when it is acceptable to revisit a decision.
3. How to resolve disagreements
Differences of opinion are common on teams, but it’s important to distinguish between differences of opinion and disagreements.
Norms can help foster healthy debate and prevent it from escalating into conflicts that damage team dynamics. Some examples are:
- Active listening: The expectation that team members will listen to understand rather than listen to respond.
- Encouraging open dialogue: Fostering an environment where people feel safe to discuss and potentially disagree respectfully.
- Agree to disagree: Setting expectations around when debates end, decisions are made, and the team moves forward despite not everyone agreeing with the next steps.
- Solution-based discussions: Committing to actively working to resolve disagreements rather than staying mired in the problem.
4. Collaboration within the team and with cross-functional partners
Collaboration does not mean the same thing to everyone. Establishing norms around how the team works together both internally and with cross-functional partners helps to foster a productive and inclusive environment. Examples include:
- Proactive communication: Sharing relevant information and updates to encourage information sharing and break down silos.
- Providing positive and constructive feedback: Expectation that team members regularly provide specific, behavior-based feedback and be open to receiving feedback.
- Respecting expertise: Acknowledge and respect the different skills and expertise of team members and leverage their expertise effectively.
- Bring in the right partners: Making sure that, based on roles and responsibilities, the right people are on projects and in meetings and discussions.
Steps To Establishing Team Norms
Intentionally establishing team norms is a collaborative process. While the leader or a neutral party (ex: an HR partner) facilitates the process, norms are by nature shaped collectively by the team.
To facilitate an effective team norms session, follow these steps:
Gather multiple perspectives
Depending on the size of the team, it may not be practical or useful to have the entire team take part in the session.
Often, team norms sessions take place at the leadership level but, to ensure that perspectives from all levels in the team are considered, gather information through surveys and conversations around things like:
- Existing team norms
- Preferred communication vehicles
- Meeting frequency and effectiveness
- Collaboration tools (existing or needed)
- Current team dynamics
- Working expectations (ex: working remotely, responding to emails after hours, etc.)
- Feedback and recognition
- Decision-making process
- Team values and priorities
Collate and share the information with attendees prior to the session to give people time to read and absorb the information.
Assess the current situation
Using the information that you gathered as well as attendees’ perspectives, assess the current situation.
It can be helpful to write each answer on sticky notes so that you can group them by theme.
Then, review the themes and prioritize them. For example, you may find that the things that fall under “Working Expectations” already exist while those under “Communication” are not. Consider:
- What is working well that you want to build on or codify into norms?
- What is not working that could be helped by establishing a new norm?
- What is beyond the scope of the discussion?
You may also start to see that there are issues that cut across themes. For example, you might identify that trust or the lack thereof is showing up in communication, collaboration, team dynamics, and decision-making.
In that case, prioritizing norms around trust will be more effective than spelling out multiple potential norms around any one category.
Some potential norms to consider here are encouraging collective problem-solving to ensure multiple voices are heard and considered, creating an explicit feedback loop as part of projects with a focus on continuous improvement, publicly recognizing people for taking a risks and learning from them, and establishing that all decisions are communicated via email within 24 hours of the decisions being made.
Brainstorm to define new norms
Brainstorm to create definitions for each theme or category. Frame them with “I” sentences. For example, “I admit when I make a mistake,” vs. “People admit when they make mistakes”.
Making the definitions personal means that each person can see themselves and their own behavior in them.
It’s also better to use plain language rather than “corporate speak”. For example, rather than “Consult subject-matter experts and leverage their expertise to inform decision-making,” write “I will consult the subject-matter expert and trust their recommendation.”
Review the norms once they are written considering what is missing and what is redundant prior to finalizing your list.
There is no perfect number of norms, and the goal is not to create a norm for everything. Start by addressing a few basics focused on communication and trust or address the biggest points of conflict.
For example, if the team is frustrated because people feel out of the loop about what is going on with the full team, establish a weekly touch base where each area provides status updates.
Introduce them to the team and get buy-in
Once the norms are finalized, share them with the team. Some guidance here:
- Explain the purpose of creating the norms and how having them will help the team
- Remind them that you gathered input from various levels to inform the final choices
- Describe the norm and the behaviors that people are expected to exhibit
- Create space for people to ask questions and provide feedback
- Explain how team members will hold one another accountable for upholding the norms
Rolling the norms out in a team meeting is a great way to demonstrate excitement about and confidence in the norms, get people engaged, and set expectations.
For future reference, ensure the people are able to refer to the norms–in a one-pager or a team-shared site.
Demonstrating the behaviors and holding people accountable
To ensure that people quickly adopt the norms, it’s essential for leaders to demonstrate them in their interactions.
Showing that the norms apply to everyone builds credibility and helps team members to follow the modeled behavior.
For example, if a norm is that all meetings start on time and end on time, people will notice if leaders are coming to meetings late or letting them run over.
It’s also important to recognize when team members follow norms in small (ex: making a positive comment directly to the person) and larger ways (ex: celebrating a win at a team meeting).
At the same time, team members should hold each other accountable and provide real-time feedback when they notice someone isn’t demonstrating the norms. Behavior change can take time, and initially people may just need a reminder or some guidance.
When team members feel that it is both safe and expected to hold each other accountable in a constructive way, the responsibility for accountability shifts away from just leadership to the entire team.
Finally, revisit norms when conditions change. For example, if your company shifts from most people working in office to most employees working a hybrid schedule, it makes sense to revisit norms around collaborating virtually vs. in person and expectations around communication.
By remaining flexible and fluid in the conditions around the team, norms will remain relevant and useful.
Team Norms Case Study: Adopting A “First Team” Mindset
A few years ago, I worked with a leadership team made up of senior executives who oversaw different functions under the umbrella of one business unit.
While the team liked one another and met regularly, decision-making was time-consuming and often fell to the team leader.
The functional teams found that they often received differing levels of information and sometimes felt that the leadership team was out of touch with what was going on across the different functions.
The department leader wanted her leadership team to feel a greater sense of responsibility for the business unit as a whole.
I facilitated a team norms session focused on Patrick Lencioni’s concept of first team—the idea that instead of prioritizing the people reporting to them, executives and leaders should prioritize their peers and the work of leading the business as a whole.
During the session leaders:
- Explored their thoughts and reactions about shifting away from a function-first mindset to a “first team” mindset.
- Discussed the behaviors of a “first team” mentality including embracing the greater good, having explicit and shared expectations, and consciously working to build the team.
- Brainstormed specific expectations and behaviors that would shape the way that they interacted with one another.
- Created a list of leadership team norms.
By the end of the session, the leadership team agreed that they would:
- Meet regularly without the team leader, bubbling recommendations and decisions for final approval up to the business unit leader.
- Use “What is best for the business unit?” as the first filter for making decisions.
- Find areas of commonality first and then debate differing points of view.
- Consistently communicate information through their respective functions.
By co-creating their team norms, the leaders had a stake in holding themselves and their peers accountable which resulted in higher trust and easier collaboration.
As a consequence, the leadership team was able to take a more active role in decision-making and problem-solving for the team as a whole.
Their teams felt the benefits, as well. Because of their commitment to collaboration, the leadership team ensured that multiple perspectives were always considered and that outcomes served the whole team, not just specific areas.
The business unit leader found that her leadership team frequently made decisions without needing more from her than her input and final approval, freeing her to do the work of leading the organization with her “first team”.
Actionable Takeaways
If you are thinking about how to start creating team norms yourself, here are three actionable takeaways to get you started:
- Identify the need for norms on your team. Think about what is challenging on your team and consider areas of inefficiency. If the team feels appropriately in the loop, you probably don’t need to start with communications. If people are frequently frustrated that they’re not brought into projects where they have expertise, that is the place to start.
- Brainstorm together. Norms are co-created through discussion and debate. Don’t just have everyone dump their thoughts into a Google doc and go from there, make it a collaborative process.
- Stay flexible and fluid. Once you and your team create norms, revisit them periodically, particularly when something in the team or environment changes. Your team norms should meet the moment and feel highly relevant.
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