A Team Charter is an agreement among the members of your team on how you will operate to ensure success. The Team Charter process ensures an awareness of team goals, anticipation of roles team members will play, processes and ground-rules for working together, and exploration of team member interests and styles that may impact team effectiveness. Here are suggestions for how to create and use a Team Charter. 1. Each team should meet to discuss the questions below
2. The team should agree and commit to a formal document that will serve as the Team Charter.
3. Each team member should express agreement to the commitments by signing the Team Charter.
4. A copy of your Team Charter should be visible during each team meeting, so that team members can refer to the document to reinforce agreements made. It should also be available to course instructors, who may want to ensure that you have a plan for completing their assignments.
5. The Team Charter should be elastic. It should be edited, upon agreement of the team members, to serve the evolving needs of the team.

MEMBERSHIP 1. Who are the members of your team and what is their contact information? 2. What is the educational background and work experience of each team member? 3. How might the diversity of the team (e.g. culture of national origin, race, gender, knowledge, background) be an opportunity and/or barrier? KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS 4. What are the top two hard skills (quantitative, writing, PowerPoint presentations, analysis, etc.) of each team member that can help the team achieve their goals? 5. What are the top two soft skills (facilitation, conflict resolution, communication, leadership, etc.) of each team member that can help the team achieve their goals? OBJECTIVES 6. What goals and expectations for the team does each team member have? 7. What are your goal(s) as a team (in particular, what do you want to accomplish)?

TEAM ROLES AND STRUCTURE 8. What are all the team assignments that your team will be working on together? What are the requirements, deliverables, and deadlines for each assignment? 9. What roles will team members play to facilitate successful completion of the assignments (i.e. how will leadership be shared, tasks be performed, communication with outside stakeholders be organized, etc.)?

WORKING TOGETHER 10. What working norms will the team establish? 11. What are the ground rules to which your team will adhere? 12. What meeting dates and times work best for each team member (e.g. consider family schedules, transportation modes and distance from school, etc.)? 13. What communication tools and methods will be used by the team and for what situations (e.g. text, email, Facebook, Skype, etc.)? How will you ensure everyone knows when and where the meetings are and that everyone is prepared? 14. How will you ensure each person meets his/her agreements to the team? What actions do you agree to take if they don't? 15. How will your team make decisions (e.g. consensus, majority, team leader makes final decisions, etc.)? 16. How will disagreements on the team be handled?

Team Charter Signatures