How to Define and Evolve Your Team Principles

Did you ever feel that your team is not sufficiently aligned? Do your team members have different ideas on how to work on products and services? Do you repeatedly experience misunderstandings about team behaviors and attitudes toward stakeholders?

Maybe it is time to agree on some team principles.

Principles are not the same thing as values. With team values, you describe non-negotiable, axiomatic truths for your team. For example, respect is a great team value. No matter what happens, the team commits to always being respectful to everyone. My Agility Scales team has picked fairness, passion, and happiness as their team values. And we will be working on some concrete stories to embrace those values thoroughly.

With team principles, you describe concrete focus areas and guide posts for your team. For example, “We only do B2B, not B2C.” is a fine team principle. And “Our highest priority is validating our product-market fit.” is another great principle. You can’t do everything as a team. Therefore, you agree to focus on what you believe is essential for your chance of success. You might be able to write dozens of principles, but you should try to limit yourselves to a small number of truly relevant ones.

Here is my suggestion how to move forward:

Guide for Defining and Evolving Team Principles

• Start with an overview of current principles. Show them to your team and read them out loud. (With a new team, you may start with zero principles.)
• Ask the team if anyone wants to add a new team principle. If yes, add it to the list when there is consensus on the team.
• Now randomize the principles and team members in such a way that each principle has one team members name assigned to it.
• For several (or maybe all) principles, ask the assigned team member to explain how, in the last few weeks, the team has honored that principle.
• If the team member doesn’t know an example, and the team is unable to help her out, the team can decide to remove that principle from the list (when the principle is not relevant anymore). Otherwise, it becomes a homework assignment for the whole team (when the principle is still important).
• When team members have easily and repeatedly produced examples of how the team has honored a principle, they may decide to remove it. (There is no need anymore to remind yourselves of this principle.)

Team Principles Example

As an example, here is the first version of our Agility Scales team’s principles which, I am sure, are going to evolve over time:

Principle #1: Power Up Your Work-Life

Our primary persona is a team member, not a manager or coach. The main purpose of our app will be to help improve a team member’s work-life. The organization can only achieve scaled agility as a result of workers feeling more empowered to run experiments and make decisions.

Principle #2: Power to the People

Our app will be personal, not corporate. Anyone can use it for free. It will be the player’s choice to connect (part of) his interaction with one or more teams and organizations. When she changes jobs, she keeps all her data. On the other hand, it can be a company’s choice to pay for any particular features.

Principle #3: The Keystone Habit Cycle

The crucial function of our MVP is to validate a keystone habit cycle: the trigger(s) + action(s) + reward(s) that are the foundation for all other habits. If people are not intrinsically motivated to use the app on a daily basis, nothing else will work, and they will not achieve organizational agility.

Principle #4: Small-Step Change

We believe that people usually change their behaviors in small steps. It makes little sense to confront people with large methods and frameworks. What they need most is a continuous improvement cycle that feeds them minor changes. Revolutions happen as an accumulation of many baby steps.

Principle #5: Start Where People Are

There is always a reason for why things the way they are. We will not achieve change by being disrespectful to people and their previous accomplishments. What they need now may be different from what they needed yesterday. But we don’t motivate people by making them feel bad about their earlier decisions.

Principle #6: Liberty, Equality, and Unity

We treat everyone the same, including top managers and HR. They may choose different features, but they start in the same place. There is no such thing as managers monitoring workers. Everyone can get access to the same features and the same data. Companies that are not willing to accept this are not ready to play the game.

Principle #7: The App As a Puzzle

We will gamify the growth and configuration of the app. Players can earn the right to unlock more features, and they can choose which “puzzle pieces” they want, depending on their roles and interests. We define every non-essential feature as a puzzle piece. This keeps the UX clean and adds value to all features.

Principle #8: Progress on Topics and Practices

There is a time for talking, and there is a time for acting. Topics are things that people can discuss; practices are things that people can do. Players make progress on both topics and practices, which we can express as a level of experience. For topics, we use the metaphor of territories. For practices, we use the metaphor of constructions.

Principle #9: Everything Is a Game

We will gamify almost everything that we do. This not only means that we match player features with gamification models. It also means that we gamify our back-end systems. We gamify our own work processes. And we help people to gamify any content that they offer through our app. If it’s not worth playing, it’s not worth doing.

Principle #10: Lead By Example

If we want to help people and organizations to improve themselves, be more agile, and increase their pace of change, then we have to do this ourselves as well. We must eat our own dog food and lead by example. This means that our team will be the first to use the app. If we don’t use it, nobody else will.

We will start iterating on our principles soon, using the simple guide described above, and the initial set of team principles that I outlined here. I’m curious to see how this will evolve!

Is this guide useful to you? Do you know how to improve it? Let us know in the comments.