One of the first things we do at an Agile For Patriots Cohort is to help the participants co-create a working agreement that will guide how they behave with each other. A working agreement is an essential practice to enable high-performing, self-managing teams.

In this month’s Agile For Patriots Board meeting, we started eating our own dog-food. We finalized our own working agreement to guide how we behave with each other.

Two members of our Leadership Team – Blake McMillan and Don McGreal facilitated a session to help us share our core values and expectations. We started by capturing our thoughts on Mural and Blake helped us discover where we were aligned and misaligned.

Within 60 minutes, Blake skillfully guided the conversations and landed the plane by helping us create the first version of our working agreement. He then took all the ideas expressed as post-it’s and distilled the essence into a single artifact. Today, we reviewed the artifact and accepted the final round of suggestions.

Here’s where we landed…

I will behave in a way that is aligned with our vision and mission.

I will demonstrate living our shared values by being courageous, focused, open, respectful, committed, consistent, accountable, and improving.

I will take personal accountability to help us continuously improve including holding myself and other accountable for these working agreements.

I will prioritize attending the monthly board member meetings and will proactively notify the group if I am unable to attend.

When I am participating in an AFP meeting I will be engaged, fully present, and avoid multi-tasking.

As a board member, I am committing to more than just board meeting attendance and I will take an active role and accomplishing the work needed.

I will be vulnerable, acknowledge when I am struggling and proactively ask for help if needed, and I expect to be challenged in a compassionate, open, and respectful way if I am not making progress on the work that I have volunteered to do.

I recognize the importance our work has on the lives of our participants and I will seek to continuously improve myself, the program, our organization to better serve the members of our cohorts.

I will be gracious and forgiving – providing room for us to make mistakes, learn and improve.

There are two reasons I wanted to share our agreement…

1. So you can hold us accountable to living by this agreement
2. So you can get a sense for our culture and decide if you want to join us

Let me know what you think, what resonates, what doesn’t and how you think we can improve.