Norms are shared agreements among team members about which behaviors are valued in the team and which behaviors are not.
Although most norms develop naturally and gradually over time, the best leaders shortcut the process by importing them from other successful teams. They declare what norms exist on the team and hold team members accountable to each other for enforcing them.
Leaving it to the team and its natural process to create norms not only takes too much time, but can also result in dysfunctional norms that get in the way of high performance.
For instance, it is not uncommon for a team to develop a norm of lateness to meetings that gets reinforced by a leader who is both often tardy themselves and waits to start meetings until everyone has strolled in. Such a norm can become powerfully symbolic as to how important it is to be respectful of other people’s time, even away from meetings.
Because most team members care a great deal about what their colleagues think of them, they will quickly comply with any team norm others consistently enact. Anyone who violates an established norm is quickly brought into line by their teammates, sometimes through indirect teasing or direct confrontation.
How vigorously a team enforces a norm typically reflects how important they perceive it is to the leader. On the best teams, leaders call out the norms. Team members call out the violators.
There are scores of useful norms employed by effective teams: from offering solutions surrounding any complaint to celebrating recent accomplishments with a high five; from framing criticism as a suggestion to refraining from smartphone use during meetings.
Most team norms don’t dictate what should be said or done. Instead, norms focus on how things are said and done and who says and does them. Of the many norms teams wrestle with, perhaps none is more important than how any given team member’s expertise is engaged by the group.
A common norm on many teams is to give leaders and those with higher status more airtime. Who makes a given comment or point, not the value of the point itself, holds more weight. As a result, worthy insights and ideas are easily overlooked and true expertise gets pushed to the side. The best leaders fight this tendency by establishing a critical norm about how people can contribute in meetings.
Norm: Anyone with expertise or a strong viewpoint who wants to be heard on a topic will be given the floor and allowed to articulate their views without interruption or disagreement.
Norms bring order, consistency, and comfort to the interaction between team members. Of the many features of highly effective teams, norms about who can advocate and how new ideas are considered have consistently been found to distinguish the highest-performing teams.
Maybe it’s time to establish a new norm.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
