The Power of Shared Agreements

Tell me you’ve been here before: it’s well past working hours, you’re already in your jammies, and you decide to take “one quick peek” at your work email before getting ready for bed.

We both know it’s never one quick peek.

The other evening I decided to check my email way too late, and was confronted with a message that really bummed me out. Why?

Because in it the sender let me know they decided to do something that we had agreed they wouldn’t do. 

We’d made an agreement about something, and then they changed their mind and did something else.

This isn’t working, I thought to myself.

After reflecting and trying to really unpack what exactly “this” was, it hit me:

We’re not aligned. 

We may have the same end goals or outcomes in mind.

We may enjoy working together and even count ourselves as friends.

But we’re not aligned on how we’ll work together.

We have the WHAT part of our work figured out, just not the HOW.

Personally, I’ve always been much more motivated to help people figure out how they work together.

Of course creating something valuable or high-quality is important, but it’s HOW a team creates that thing that really propels my curiosity and interest.

So I’ll admit, as someone who’s obsessed with the How of work, seeing that my teammate and I were misaligned really bummed me out. 

It caught me off-guard and left me flat-footed.

And it did not feel good.

How often do you create space for discussions with your teammates about how you work? 

How you communicate, how you collaborate, how you handle conflict, how you make decisions?

How often do you invite a conversation with your spouse or partner about how you run your family?

How you prioritize, how you parent, how you discipline, how you spend?

What we’re talking about here are Shared Agreements. 

Others might call them Ground Rules, Rules of the Road, or Team Commitments.

Whatever you call them, DO. NOT. SKIP. THIS. STEP.

This is for two reasons:

First, shared agreements help you set the stage and create space for everyone to get what they need in order to bring their best. 

This can be as simple as a project leader asking the team: what do you need from the others on this team in order to feel like you can bring your best work to this project? Invite that list from everyone, then synthesize those needs into a draft agreement that the whole team can commit to.

Second, shared agreements become tangible artifacts that showcase how you’re choosing to show up for each other, day in and day out. Even in the virtual times of COVID, we can and should still make these artifacts visible – through team conversations and rituals, virtual collaboration boards, even team swag.

Not only that, but these artifacts can become reference points when (inevitably) things break down.

Because here’s the thing: they will break down. 

We’re human, we stray off course. And then, we recalibrate.

When I started training to become a coach, I learned the term “Designed Alliance.” As a designer myself, I loved this phrasing immediately, but I loved it even more when my instructor said, 

“The beauty of a designed alliance is that we always, always have permission to redesign it.”

I tell this to my coaching clients whenever I start a new engagement: we design our alliance (the first draft) and give ourselves permission to redesign as needed.

So what’s the moral of this story?

First, don’t check email at night. Seriously.

Second, we know when there are breakdowns – in communications, in relationships. We can feel their presence in our racing heartbeat, our clenched fist, or an uneasy gut.

We don’t need to continue feeling that way. 

But we have to be brave enough to begin a conversation about the HOW. 

We have to be intentional enough to invest in the mechanics of our relationships, not just in the outputs we produce together.

We have to be willing to say out loud:

This isn’t working – for me, for us. How can we get back on track?

Onward,