Using shared development of ground rules to build teamwork
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Why have ground rules?
Pause for a moment and think about your answer to the following question:
What rules should be followed in all meetings, by everyone, to give those meetings the best chance of being productive and efficient?
If you wrote down your answers in a list and you were to ask other people to do the same, would you all come up with the same list? And would the list be likely to change depending on whether the context was a calm and ordered discussion or a fractious ‘political’ meeting?
Our view of what rules should apply often vary depending on who we are and the circumstances we are in at the time. And if they are not written down and agreed somewhere, those assumed rules shift under pressure. They cannot be relied on by everyone. So they are not really rules at all, just self-imposed conventions at best.
As a result, unproductive behaviours regularly undermine meeting efficiency.
Purpose of meeting ground rules
Conversely, where the rules have been defined, it gives people the opportunity to:
- Recalibrate their expectations of their own and each other’s behaviour
- Operate within a consistent set of explicit rules, and not be hampered by assumed ones
- Actively adjust the rules (together) if it becomes collectively advantageous to do so
- Use the rules to address circumstances when unproductive behaviour takes place
How to use ground rules
To be effective, ground rules need to be agreed by everyone at the meeting. If they are not, they are unlikely to carry any weight with people when they are most needed.Fortunately, getting people to agree ground rules is not particularly difficult. The groundrules on the right are based on the structure of effective meetings that is utilised within this site. Alternatively this unstructured list provide a reasonable basis for gaining agreement. Feel free to adapt them to your own needs.
To use them, add them as sticky notes to your virtual whiteboard (or flipchart). Propose them as a code which will help to ensure the meeting remains productive. And ask ‘if we, as a group, are willing to adopt these for the meeting’? The answer is likely to be yes. But if there is dissent, ask the dissenters what they would need to see changed in the groundrules. In order to make them something that they could commit to. And then either make the adjustments, or take the matter off-line.
Team developed ground rules
The best ground rules for a team to follow are often those they develop themselves. Thinking up the ground rules can be a relatively easy task. Simply explore their experience of what typically creates undesireable delays, outcomes or interactions. And then get them to propose ground rules to prevent these things happening.This free Google Jamboard Ground Rules template is a quick and easy way to engage the team in developing ground rules for themselves using the model explained above.
Groundrules can apply to behaviours outside the meeting also, as this great example from IBM indicates:
Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.