Set the Norms

“What are norms?” you ask me. They are the rules of conduct in a group. Often they are emergent and unspoken. But what if different people have different ideas of what the norms are? They will behave in a way that they think is appropriate, but their behavior will be perceived as inappropriate. Then the judging begins: That person is a jerk, a bully, pushy, pushover, etc. Americans deal with a huge number of messages about what is normal. We get them from the many cultures that make up this country, from national to regional to familial to corporate. We navigate high context/low context values (blunt vs. subtle communication) to cooperative/competitive to conflict averse/conflict accepting and more.

For example, let’s look at the behavior of interrupting. Let’s say one team member, Margot, came from a big family in Chicago where talking over each other was normal. Only way you could get a word in edgewise! She also works in sales, where fast talking is valued. Now she’s on a team with Jim, who is from Maine, a Quaker, and Japanese-English. Jim thinks Margot is the rudest person he’s ever met, and can’t stand to be in a meeting with her. Margot thinks Jim is a doormat.

I suspect most initial storming (conflict) is teams trying to normalize varying norms. You could avoid the worst of inter-team conflict by collectively designing the team norms. Instead of letting norms be unspoken and emergent, speak about them and choose what the team will accept and what it won’t. A lot of headaches can be solved if you’re willing to have conversations to make the norms explicit.

Educator Andre Plaut taught me an exercise to help classrooms determine their norms. Andre specializes in adult education, and found when classes decide how they want to learn—as opposed to accepting the benevolent dictatorship of the professor—they learn more quickly and completely. I still use that exercise with my classes, and I adapted that norm setting exercise for teams. It’s easy to run this exercise with new teams, as creating a team charter and/or “rules for our team” is a pretty typical part of team forming. But even if the team has been around a while, you can use the start of a quarter as a “do over” moment, and run this exercise.