Team Charter
Get a new or reset team explicit about purpose, roles, and working norms before the first sprint, not three sprints in.
People→
Norms→
Commitment
01 / Summary
What Is a Team Charter?
A team charter is a short, working document a team writes and agrees to together at the start of its life, or at a reset point, that spells out why the team exists, who is on it and what each person owns, and how the team will actually work together day to day. It is not a mission statement pinned to a wall; it is a reference the team pulls out when a disagreement about scope, decision rights, or meeting cadence starts to slow things down.
Project Management Institute research on team chartering frames it as a five-part exercise: positioning the team, agreeing a values statement, agreeing a mission statement, setting goals, and writing the operating agreement that governs how the team behaves. This workshop compresses that into a single facilitated session and produces a charter the team actually wrote, not one written for them.
02 / Application
When to Use a Team Charter Workshop?
Run this workshop any time a group of people is about to start depending on each other and hasn’t yet agreed, out loud, how that is going to work.
New Team Stand-Up
A newly formed Agile team, project team, or cross-functional squad is about to start its first sprint or first iteration together.
Team Reset After Change
Membership changed significantly (new lead, new members, a merge of two teams) and old, unwritten norms no longer fit who is actually in the room.
Recurring Friction
The team is functional but keeps tripping over the same disagreements about decision rights, meeting cadence, or definition of done.
New Cross-Team Initiative
A temporary or matrixed team is forming around a specific initiative and needs fast alignment without the luxury of months to build trust.
Prerequisites
A Confirmed Roster
The people who will actually do the work are identified and invited; a charter written without its team is just a document.
A Named Sponsor or Purpose
Someone can state, in a sentence, why this team exists and what it’s accountable for, even if the team will sharpen that language itself.
Roles and Responsibilities
Keep the working session itself limited to the team doing the work. A sponsor who stays in the room for the norms conversation tends to flatten it.
Scheduling and Timing
- Plan for a half-day (three to four hours) for a team of six to ten people; smaller teams can often finish in two hours.
- Best scheduled in the first week a new team is together, or immediately after a significant membership or mandate change.
- Revisit and re-confirm the charter at major milestones (new PI, new quarter) or any time membership changes materially.
- Send the pre-read at least three business days ahead so people arrive with a starting opinion, not a blank slate.
03 / Preparation
Preparing for the Workshop
Preparation determines whether this session produces a charter the team actually uses or a document nobody remembers writing. A facilitator who walks in cold, with no sense of the team’s mandate or its known friction points, will spend the session asking questions instead of guiding a conversation the team is ready to have.
- Confirm the team’s roster, sponsor, and a one-sentence statement of why the team exists.
- Identify any known friction points or open questions (roles, decision rights, prior conflicts) the facilitator should be ready to surface.
- Reserve a room or virtual whiteboard with space for the charter to be built visibly in real time.
- Download and prepare the Team Charter Template and the Facilitator’s Presentation for the session.
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Send scheduling communication with agenda and pre-read materials
Email Template
Subject: [Team Name] Team Charter Workshop — Prep and Pre-ReadHi team,
We’re holding a Team Charter Workshop on [date] to get explicit, as a team, about our purpose, roles, and how we want to work together.
Before the session, take five minutes to think about: what you think this team’s purpose is, what you need from your teammates to do good work, and one working norm you’d want us to agree to. We’ll build the charter together in the room using what everyone brings.
Location/Link: [link]
Duration: [half day / two hours]Calendar Invite Copy
Subject: Team Charter WorkshopAgenda: Purpose and mission, roles and decision rights, working agreements, drafting and read-back, commitment.
Room/Virtual: [link]
Come ready to talk honestly about how you want this team to work, not just what it should deliver.
04 / Facilitation
Facilitating the Session
Facilitation moves in one direction: from why the team exists, down to the specific behaviors it commits to. Resist the urge to let the room debate strategy or org-chart questions that sit above this team’s control; anchor every discussion back to what this specific group of people is going to do differently starting Monday.
Facilitation Agenda
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Open and Set Context
- Sponsor or lead states the team’s mandate in plain language, then leaves the norms conversation to the team itself.
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Define Purpose and Success
- The team drafts a one- or two-sentence purpose statement and names two or three concrete measures of success.
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Clarify Roles and Decision Rights
- Walk each role represented in the room and agree, out loud, who decides what and who simply needs to be consulted.
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Set Working Agreements
- Cover meeting cadence, response-time expectations, how disagreements get raised, and what “done” means for this team.
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Draft and Read Back the Charter
- Capture every agreement on the shared board as it’s made, then read the full charter back to the room for confirmation.
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Commit and Set a Review Date
- Each member confirms they can live with the charter as written and the team sets a date to revisit it.
Common Anti-Patterns to Avoid
- Writing the charter for the team instead of with it — a facilitator or lead drafting norms in advance defeats the purpose.
- Letting the purpose statement stay so generic it could apply to any team in the company.
- Skipping decision rights because “we’ll figure it out as we go,” which is exactly the conflict this workshop exists to prevent.
- Treating the charter as a one-time artifact instead of a living document the team revisits when something changes.
05 / Follow-Up
After the Workshop
What happens in the days after this workshop determines whether the charter becomes a living reference or a forgotten file. Follow-up should be fast, land in a place the team actually looks, and put the review date on the calendar before momentum fades.
Expected Outputs
Share the finished charter within 48 hours, distributed to every team member and the sponsor, and posted somewhere the team already looks (a pinned channel message or shared workspace page), not buried in a folder no one opens again.
Follow-Up Communication Template
Hi team,
Attached is the Team Charter we wrote together, covering our purpose, roles and decision rights, and working agreements.
Please review it once more this week; if anything doesn’t match what you agreed to in the room, flag it to [name] before [date]. Otherwise this is what we’re holding each other to.
We’ll revisit this charter on [review date]. Questions before then should come to [name].
Ongoing Next Steps
- Team lead posts the signed charter somewhere the team already works, not just in an email thread.
- Any decision-rights or working-agreement disputes in the next month get resolved by pointing back to the charter first.
- Revisit the charter at the scheduled review date, or immediately after any membership change.
- New team members read the charter as part of onboarding, not as an afterthought.
- Facilitator checks in at the one-month mark to confirm the agreements are actually holding up in practice.
06 / References and Resources
References and Resources
- Project Management Institute: Developing a Team Charter
- Atlassian: Team Charter Template
- Atlassian Team Playbook: Working Agreements Play
Complimentary Workshops
Epics and Capabilities Workshop
Turn portfolio goals into sized, fundable Epics and Capabilities.
Story Pointing Workshop
Give the team a shared, repeatable way to size backlog items before they commit to a sprint.
Ready to facilitate?
Download templates and tools to run your own Team Charter session.