Hi Reader,
Imagine a NFL team showing up to a game with no playbook, or no clear scheme to guide the way they play. Everyone is talented. Everyone is working hard. But each person is operating from their own playbook. That’s backyard football, not professional sports. A team that showed up like this would be considered incredibly unprepared. Every sports talk show in America would be talking about it.
Now compare that to what NFL teams actually do - they embrace a style of play that gives shape to every detail. They clarify how they will respond as a unit when they face certain variables. They regularly review game tape with the intention of learning and improving. When game day arrives, the team looks truly together because of what they already clarified.
Contrast this with the reality for leadership teams. They also spend time in “the game.” Sure gametime looks a bit different - its things like team meetings, collaborative project planning, and navigating real-time conflict. But unlike NFL teams, many of them haven’t clarified their style of play or scheme. As a result, people respond in ways that lean more on individual experience than a shared approach. When this is the case teams will collaborate in wildly inconsistent ways, leading to fractured culture and silos that create barriers to true teamship.
Teamship Starts With a Team Charter
If teamship is the ability to work together as one unit rather than a collection of individuals, then it has to begin with shared design. Teamship does not emerge from talent alone. It is built through clarity around purpose, expectations, and the way work happens. This is where a Team Charter comes in.
A Team Charter is the shared agreement that defines why a team exists and how it will work together. It clarifies the team’s purpose. It names commitments. It establishes the rhythms and decision practices that guide how a team operates. It creates a shared language for how the team leads. Most important, a Team Charter is not born from a founder or CEO that goes away for a weekend in the woods, emerging with a vision for how the leadership team will work together, it is built together - as a team.
A Team Charter does not suddenly make a team highly prepared, but it does give them a great starting point to build from. Instead of relying on assumptions, habits, or individual personality, the team begins to rely on shared design. It is the shift from hoping alignment shows up to intentionally creating it.
This is what separates backyard football from professional teamship.
Why Leadership Teams Need a Charter More Than Any Other Team
Leadership teams carry a unique weight. They are responsible for setting direction, stewarding resources, shaping culture, and making the most consequential decisions in the organization. The impact of how they work together does not stay contained to their own meetings. It ripples outward into every department, every team, and every frontline experience. And yet, leadership teams are often the groups operating with the least explicit agreement about how they work together.
They inherit meeting rhythms. They assume alignment. They rely on goodwill, personality, and history. Because they are always in motion and under pressure to produce, they rarely slow down to design how they will lead together. Over time, the team becomes very busy but not always very aligned. Decisions feel heavier and move slower. Tension lingers longer. Misalignment quietly multiplies. This is why a Team Charter matters more here than anywhere else.
When a leadership team lacks a shared charter, the organization feels it in the form of fragmented priorities, inconsistent communication, slow decisions, and competing interpretations of what matters most. But when a leadership team designs how it will function together with intention, it becomes a stabilizing force for the entire system.
The Team Charter as the Foundation of the Executive Team Operating System
A Leadership Team Charter establishes the conditions where high performance can be practiced and strengthened over time. It is the starting line, not the finish line. A well-designed charter brings clarity to five essential areas:
- Team Purpose: Why this team exists and what it is collectively responsible for stewarding.
- Core Commitments: How teammates show up for one another through shared mindsets, behaviors, and relational norms.
- Collaboration Systems: How the team operates through rhythms, decision practices, communication routines, and accountability structures.
- Frameworks and Tools: The shared language and mental models that ground how the team interprets leadership, health, and performance.
- Teamship Renewal: How the team reviews, reinforces, and refines its agreements over time.
When these five elements come together, your leadership team finally has its version of a playbook. It is not a rigid script, but a shared structure that ensures you are no longer improvising your way through the work. Like a well-coached team, you gain clarity about the roles you play, the way you respond under pressure, and the patterns that create momentum. Instead of relying on individual instincts, the team begins to move with collective intention. This is how teams shift from collaboration that looks like backyard football to coordinated teamship.
P.S. - Coming next: We unpack the team charter even further and offer examples you can learn from for each section.
-Shaun & Joe
Enjoying this newsletter?
You’ll love the conversations happening on our Leading Together Podcast and YouTube channel, where we dive deeper into how you can build a high performing leadership team
|
Get the 6 Levers Book
In today's fast-paced business environment, creating a healthy and high-performing organization is more challenging than ever. That's where At the Heart of Work comes in - a practical guide that introduces the 6 Levers Framework, designed to help leaders like you align people and systems effectively.
Whether you're leading a small team or an entire organization, the insights from this book will equip you to build a resilient, purpose-driven workplace where teams thrive.
Upcoming Events & Opportunities: