How to Facilitate Team Work Agreements: A Practical, 10-Step Process for Building a Right-Minded Team That Works as One

Is your team struggling to overcome interpersonal conflicts, poor performance, or process issues? Solve your challenges with Right-Minded Teamwork’s Work Agreements, and guide teammates to do no harm while working as one.

What Is This Book About?

Right-Minded Teamwork (RMT) is a business-oriented, psychological approach to team building where acceptance, forgiveness, and adjustment are teammate characteristics, and 100% customer satisfaction is the team's result. Work Agreements are the third of RMT’s five core tools, called the 5 Elements.

Work Agreements are collective team pledges to transform non-productive, dysfunctional team behaviors into positive, constructive, team-based choices and actions.

Work Agreements are not guidelines or ground rules. They are emotionally mature promises that guide a team to work collaboratively towards the shared goal of achieving customer satisfaction. With Work Agreements, your team can openly resolve issues that are already hurting or which have the potential to hurt team performance.

This book will teach you how to successfully create and implement team Work Agreements. Strictly speaking, there is no one absolute right way to facilitate Work Agreement dialogues, but the fundamental principles for team transformation are captured in the 10 Steps covered in this book. Learn them, and you will succeed.

Is This Book for You?

This book is written primarily for team facilitators. However, team leaders and teammates may also follow these steps to create powerful, effective, Right-Minded Work Agreements that solve and prevent interpersonal and process problems.

Work Agreements: Navigate Team Conflict

If you’ve ever been part of a team, you know it is not a matter of if conflict will occur among teammates. It is a question of when. Like a complex machine without an operator's manual, if strong teamwork is not actively maintained, team performance will eventually degrade into separateness and egotistical self-interest. Work Agreements draw teammates back together again by transforming dysfunctional work behaviors into mature, behavioral teamwork promises that produce real results.

It is far better to have Work Agreements in place before teammate disagreements happen because established Work Agreements can serve to mitigate and even make positive use of teammate clashes. However, even if your team is already in conflict, it’s still not too late (and will never be too late!) to create and actively live team Work Agreements.

A Note from Dan Hogan, Co-Creator of RMT

In the thirty-five years of my team-building career, I facilitated over 500 teams in varying states of conflict and dysfunction. Every team created some kind of Work Agreement and succeeded as a result.

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Work Agreements work. They are right for every team, everywhere, forever. If you use them, I promise they will help make your team(s) and the world a better place.

Let's get started right now.

Dan Hogan, Certified Master Facilitator