How-to Guide: Create a Team Agreement
Explore your team’s values and build a positive culture
A team agreement helps create an environment where everyone feels safe, respected, ready to have fun and perform at their best. It will help people agree about how to act, talk, and treat each other when they’re involved in their sport.
Why do team agreements matter?
Team agreements bring predictability and trust to the team, ensuring everyone knows how to act in different situations (meetings, travel, practice, etc.).
By aligning guidelines with team members’ values, you help people feel understood and respected. This boosts teamwork and reduces conflicts.
How to create a team agreement
You can create a positive, values-driven environment that fosters accountability and unity by following these steps at the beginning of each season:
Step 1:
Explore Personal Values
Team members list and share their top values (e.g., hard work, fairness), and how they will turn up in their behaviours. For example, if the value is hard work, the behaviour could be “I arrive at practice early so I’m ready when it starts”.
Step 2:
Create Team Values
Combine individual values into 3-5 team values that everyone supports.
Step 3:
Identify Contexts
List all the settings where the team is together (meetings, competitions, training, travelling, online, or others).
Step 4:
Make Guidelines for Each Value and Context
For example, if your team values hard work, a guideline could be keeping phones on “do not disturb” during meetings.
Additional Resources
Would you like to do this exercise with your team? You can download a worksheet below.
