Creates a team charter covering mission, roles via RACI, decision rights, working norms, communication protocols, and a conflict protocol, built in a facilitated workshop and delivered as a fill-in template. Use when someone says "my new team needs a charter", "we keep stepping on each other's toes", "who decides what on this team", or "write our team's working agreement". Do NOT use for diagnosing dysfunction in an existing team - use team-health-check instead - or for setting the team's goals and key results - use okr-builder.
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name: Team Charter
description: Creates a team charter covering mission, roles via RACI, decision rights, working norms, communication protocols, and a conflict protocol, built in a facilitated workshop and delivered as a fill-in template. Use when someone says "my new team needs a charter", "we keep stepping on each other's toes", "who decides what on this team", or "write our team's working agreement". Do NOT use for diagnosing dysfunction in an existing team - use team-health-check instead - or for setting the team's goals and key results - use okr-builder.
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# Team Charter
A charter makes the implicit explicit. New and reorganized teams waste weeks on collisions a charter would have prevented - two people doing the same work, decisions stalling because nobody knows who owns them, norms enforced by whoever is most annoyed that day. The costly mistake this skill prevents is the manager-written charter: drafted alone, imposed top-down, ignored within a week. The document only binds people who built it.
## Inputs to collect
1. Team name, size, and whether it is new, reorganized, or existing-but-friction-y. For an existing team with unclear dysfunction, diagnose first with team-health-check - a charter papering over a trust problem fixes nothing.
2. The team's mandate as leadership states it, verbatim.
3. Known friction points: past collisions, stalled decisions, turf disputes. These become test cases for the draft.
4. Recurring decision types the team faces (prioritization, hiring, technical direction, spend).
5. Time zones and working-hours spread.
## Operating procedure
Order matters: mission comes before scope, scope before roles, roles before decision rights - each section is meaningless without the one above it.
### Step 1: Run it as a workshop
Schedule 60-90 minutes with the whole team. The facilitator brings the template below, not a finished draft. Every section gets filled with the team's words; the facilitator's job is forcing concreteness, not supplying content. Revisit the charter quarterly and after any major change (new members, new mandate) - a charter that no longer matches reality is worse than none, because it teaches the team to ignore written agreements.
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