Write Down Your Team’s Unwritten Rules - Liz Fosslien, Mollie West Duffy

This resource first appeared in issue #48 on 30 Oct 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing

It’s very likely that my team is going to grow significantly over the coming months. That’s a huge opportunity but also a challenge - we have a pretty good team culture now and we don’t want to make any unintentional changes to that.

In addition, we’ve had a few discussions recently where it’s been clear that expectations I thought were clear - about learning, contributing to others’ work, working hours - were not at all clear to some team members, because it wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere.

As a result of both of these things, we’ve started writing up a “culture deck” to make explicit what our expectations are, and by extension what we would look for in new team members. So this article by Fosslien and Duffy comes at a good time to check that effort against. The basic idea of the article is summed up nicely in the title; by making team norms and expectations explicit (and having the team members contribute to the document!) you not only communicate them widely but make it much easier to maintain those expectations and norms.

Of course, then you have to make sure both you and the team behave according to those expectations, and provide transparency or feedback when (inevitably) you or a team member slip.