Four tips for developing norms for collaboration agreements

By Edgar Cardenas.

Norms are the foundational building blocks for collaboration agreements. Hence, we must consider what’s an effective way for teams to develop the norms underpinning a collaboration agreement? How can teams build on experience and avoid getting bogged down when negotiating norms?

In helping teams to develop norms that enable productive collaborations, I use Richard Hackman’s definition of norms as “shared agreements among members about what behaviors are valued in the group, and what behaviors are not. They refer only to behavior, including things members say, not to unexpressed private thoughts and feelings” (Hackman, 2011, p.103).

In other words, norms that help you collaborate better must be grounded by clearly identifiable behaviors and team members must agree to abide by these norms. When developing a norm, the team then has to ask: “Is the behavior clear enough that team members have a shared understanding of the specific behavior?” and “Do we agree to using this norm?”

Teams often get bogged down when they negotiate the specificity of their agreed-upon norms. For example, when addressing conflict, teams consistently respond by agreeing that they will talk about issues openly but rarely distinguish what will be talked about or the specific process for addressing conflict. Under what conditions do they address conflicts at the team meeting versus one-on-one? How much time is allowed to pass before they talk about the issue (eg., which conflicts trigger an immediate discussion and which can wait)? Who should lead the discussion? What does it look like to discuss the conflict?

Early in a collaboration, this kind of specificity can feel overwhelming, as teams attempt to account for every possible scenario. What can ease this anxiety is reframing collaboration agreements as living documents, meaning you can revise the document over time and the goal is incremental improvement over the life of your collaboration.

To avoid getting bogged down, I have created some scaffolding that fosters this incremental approach to norm development. This scaffolding helps teams take advantage of their experiences and harness the power of iteration. The scaffolding comprises the following four tips for teams or those facilitating them:

1. Get down some easy ideas to work with
   Write down the collaboration norms you think will be easy wins. These could be things you already do as a team or things you would like to see. Start by brainstorming, getting the ideas out first. The norms will likely feel incomplete at first, but it’s easier to revise a norm than attempt to develop a “perfect” norm. The aim is to practice the development process on something easy for your team to initially agree to and then review and revise the norm over time.
2. Take little (1%) bites
   This tip is adopted from the marginal gains principle of incremental improvement, popularized by Dave Brailsford during his time as a coach for British Cycling (Hall et al., 2012; Harrell, 2015). The aim is to break down performance into every variable that affects it. If a 1% improvement can be made per variable, the aggregate of those improvements will be substantial. In terms of developing norms, you don’t need to break down every variable of collaboration, but the sentiment is relevant.
   Small improvements make it easier for team members to build confidence and motivation regarding how they collaborate. The aim then is to look at what norms your team is already using (implicit or explicit) and identify what a marginal improvement to these norms would look like. The aggregate of these gains gives your team a healthy bump in performance.
3. Use memory shortcuts
   You have had good and bad collaborative experiences, so use that to your advantage. Begin by reflecting on your most successful and least successful collaborations, and the specific behaviors that made those collaborations successful or not. If your entire team engages in this form of reflexivity you can come up with lots of ideas about what you want to try and what you want to avoid.
   The reason this exercise works so well is that it’s easier to deconstruct norms from previous examples than to think up new norms. The more specific and concrete your examples, the easier it will be to adopt and devise good norms from those experiences.
   After you have identified the most and least successful collaborative experiences, you can extend the exercise by reflecting on a situation where your collaboration took a bad turn and the behaviors your team took to resolve the issue. Did it make your team stronger because of the struggle or was the behavior a misstep? This is an effective way to home in on behaviors that can benefit or compromise collaboration.
4. Revisit, reflect, and revise
   As mentioned earlier, treat your collaboration agreement as a living document, remembering to update it to make sure it’s working for your team. Early in the collaboration you will revisit and revise more often, perhaps checking in every month to see what is and isn’t working. You’ll notice some norms are easier to enact than others and some might even conflict with each other.
   By starting small and regularly checking in, you more effectively course-correct and minimize large mistakes. Over time the agreement will get better and require less updating. Still, checking in on what you wrote as a team helps maintain cohesion and will keep you attentive to the needs of your team, especially when member priorities change, members leave, and new members join your team. Even for a mature team, it can be a useful habit to review the agreement every 6 months or so.

Conclusion

Teams often assume that the process of developing the norms for a collaboration agreement needs to immediately produce a fully resolved agreement, requiring little to no revision. This is not the case. In fact, placing this kind of pressure on the team to produce a comprehensive document often leads to its own frustrations, inhibiting creativity and hampering follow through. Instead, start small, reflect on past experiences, revisit, and revise the agreement as needed to make it work best for your team.

Finally, a major advantage to taking an incremental approach to norm development means you don’t need to be afraid of making mistakes, because they will be small and you’ll learn from them. The process will allow you to accelerate team learning and improve collaboration.

What other tips would you recommend to improve the process of making collaboration agreements? Are there incremental tactics you have used to make collaborations more effective? If so, please share your experiences!

References:

Hackman, J. R. (2011). Collaborative intelligence: Using teams to solve hard problems. Berrett-Koehler Publishers: San Francisco, California, United States of America.

Hall, D., James, D. and Marsden, N. (2012). Marginal gains: Olympic lessons in high performance for organisations. HR Bulletin: Research and Practice, 7, 2: 9–13.

Harrell, E. (2015). How 1% performance improvements led to Olympic gold. Harvard Business Review, 30: 1–7. (Online – open access): https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-1-performance-improvements-led-to-olympic-gold

Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)

Biography: Edgar Cardenas PhD is a co-founder and Associate Director for the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative Center at Michigan State University in East Lansing, USA. His work focuses on developing collaborative capacity for cross-disciplinary teams and he has worked closely with multiple universities and government organizations. In addition to using established team science approaches to capacity building, he also incorporates structured dialogue and collective creativity approaches with teams.