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Group Norms

The Cross-Cultural Team Dynamics slides are available as a reference.

Discussing and setting group norms is a great approach for meeting your group members, setting behavior expectations, and creating a reference document in case you have internal disagreements later on. Use these steps as a guide to discuss and set your group's norms before beginning your projects:

  1. Brainstorming: At this point there are no wrong answers, focus on discussion and building on each other! Write down and develop all the ideas you can think of related to group norms including why you think they’re important, what you hope for them to achieve, and how they may (or may not) change over time. Some considerations:
    • How can you build and maintain Cognitive & Affective trust?
    • What can you do if that trust is damaged?
    • How does your team want to balance Discussion & Debate? When is one more appropriate than the other?
    • How will your team approach meeting times and agendas?
    • How and where do you want to communicate about different aspects of the project?
    • What makes you feel respected? Or disrespected?
    • … dig deep in your memory and your imagination - what else could be important?
  2. Distilling: Debate different proposed norms and topics from the previous section. At the end of this time you should have a list of statements and aspirations you can all agree on. Your list doesn’t need to be in any specific format and it can be as long as you want.
  3. Refining: Refine your list into a focused list of intention-based group norms. An intention-based norm focuses on outcomes or purposes, it does not describe specific behaviors. For example “We will respect each other’s time in synchronous and asynchronous communication” sets a clear expectation, but does not specify how to reach this goal. Respecting time can mean something very different to each person in your group! Intention-based norms leave more room for flexibility and cultural difference - but only if all group members keep an open mind, open communication, and a forgiving spirit. Try refining your list to less than 10 norms; merge related norms into one when possible.
  4. Summarizing: Summarize your norms into 1-3 sentences that capture your group's goals and intentions. You can think of this summary as part of an onboarding document; What would you like a new group member to understand in their first days?

Naming Yourselves

Create a name for your group. It can be serious, or not! You can use this name in your repo description, main README, planning README, project issue, and anywhere else you'd like to.

Template File

Here's a template you can copy-paste into /planning/README.md for inspiration.

# (your group name)

<!-- group norms summary goes here -->

## Group Norms

<!-- group norms list goes here -->