for anyone on a team that should work better than it does.
Most workplaces have a framework for how teams should work together. Some call it standard operating procedures. Leadership wrote it for good reasons. When teams duplicate effort, drop handoffs, or fight over who decides, customers feel it, and the budget shows it.
Then Monday comes. The framework says to collaborate. It does not tell you what to do when two people disagree in a meeting, or who to call when a handoff fails. A director can require that two departments align. A director does not sit in the room where alignment happens, or does not. You do.
Some people carry the work. Others ride along. People discuss problems in the hallway after the meeting instead of in it. The same issue returns months after everyone thinks they've fixed it.
If that sounds like your group, a new leader or a new app probably won’t fix it. What works is a small set of behaviors the group runs on purpose, together. This guidebook lays out five of them, with step-by-step exercises for each.
You do not need authority to run these. The five actions work for a project team, a volunteer board, a parent group, or a department that has stopped talking to itself. Start with one exercise and two people. The guide shows you how to grow from there and how to introduce the work to your peers, your department, and your boss.
You will get a PDF (26MB) file
Discover
The five actions
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Action 1
Build your base
Choose the small group you keep on purpose, and build trust that does not reset.
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Action 2
Teach what you know
Hand a skill to the person beside you, and grow what your people can do.
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Action 3
Name what is happening
Say the pattern out loud, so the meeting stops repeating itself.
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Action 4
Pool what you have
Map what each person holds, and ask for what any one of you is short.
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Action 5
Stay in the room
Finish what you started, and keep your seat when the work gets hard.
“I wrote the first version of these five in graduate school, in the Design Management program at the Pratt Institute, where nearly every course assigned the work to multidisciplinary teams. The method came from the farm in Caroline County where I grew up, from an oral charter nobody ever wrote down. Whoever the work touched decided how it got done. Whoever knew something taught it. Disagreements got settled out loud, in the room, while everyone was still standing in it. That charter held the land, the food, and the people together for years. ”
After the Five
What you will learn
Run the five actions and finish the exercises. You end with three things you can use where the outcome is real.
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Introduce it where it counts
You do not walk in with a stack of stapled pages. You propose one action as the fix for one problem the room already knows it has, and you know what to say to peers, your department, and your boss.
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Create a written charter
The method delivers a tangible, written charter that works when you run it.
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Prepare to pitch it
A four-step exercise: name the problem, pick the action, write it, and bring it to the audience that can approve it.
You finish withA tested proposal, ready for the people who decide.
Some people carry the work. Others ride along. People discuss problems in the hallway after the meeting instead of in it. The same issue returns months after everyone thinks they've fixed it.
If that sounds like your group, a new leader or a new app probably won’t fix it. What works is a small set of behaviors the group runs on purpose, together. This guidebook lays out five of them, with step-by-step exercises for each.
You do not need authority to run these. The five actions work for a project team, a volunteer board, a parent group, or a department that has stopped talking to itself. Start with one exercise and two people. The guide shows you how to grow from there and how to introduce the work to your peers, your department, and your boss.
You will get a PDF (26MB) file