I use shared agreements in my work with conflict resolution, team dynamics, and executive coaching. Honestly, people probably get sick of me talking about them. But, I fundamentally believe they are the cornerstone of a well-functioning culture. I recently worked with a leadership team - the request was leadership alignment, helping everyone get role clarity, and learn to communicate more openly. We cascaded out a few sessions of work and landed with shared agreements.
When Google studied what makes teams effective, psychological safety came out as the most important of five factors. That's the shared belief that you can speak up, ask a question, or admit a mistake without being punished for it. Google also found that how a team agrees to work together mattered more than who was on it.
We didn't start with solutions, we started by naming what was actually happening. Through a few exercises, the group got honest about where things were breaking down, and then they did something harder: they agreed to be different. Out of that came five shared agreements about how they would work with each other, including assuming good intent, being clear about what they know and what they don't, and treating each other as skilled leaders.
I'm not going to share the exact agreements, because they wouldn't work for you. They were written for that group, about that group's specific challenges and surfaced from their own discussion on pain points. Working agreements are the specific behaviors a group chooses in order to support psychological safety, and because they reflect one particular environment, the act of creating them builds awareness, empathy, and a sense of shared effort. In this case, the value was never the wording. It was the fact that the people living with the problem built the solution.
Making the Space is the Work
Most teams never stop to decide how they want to work together. We hand people a job description, a calendar full of meetings, and a vague hope that it all works out. When it doesn't, we blame personalities.
Setting aside real time to talk about it is a statement in itself. It says that how we treat each other is worth an hour of our attention, even when the to-do list is long. In that office, some of the most important moments weren't the agreements themselves. They were the quiet stretches where people had to stop and think about what they needed from each other, and what they were willing to give.
That kind of pause also changes how people show up. When you've helped decide what assuming good intent looks like, it's harder to sit in a meeting half-listening or reading motives into a colleague's tone. The agreements give people something concrete to be present for. Being fully there stops being a vague expectation and becomes a choice you've made out loud, alongside people who made the same one.
It Doesn’t Take a Crisis
I saw the same thing with a very different team. Nothing was on fire. They were wrestling with shared spaces, scheduling, and who communicates what to whom. Small stuff, until it wasn’t. Over several sessions, they developed their own agreements, and the daily friction eased. Different problems, same process. Whether the stakes are trust or a messy kitchen, agreements land when people help write them.
Leaders Go First
Here's the part that's easy to skip. Before you bring agreements to a whole team, the senior leaders have to adopt them and model them first.
If the people at the top treat agreements as something for everyone else, the team will notice immediately. Agreements that leaders exempt themselves from are just rules for the rest of the staff. But when a senior leader says "can you clarify?" in a meeting, or admits what they don't yet know, it gives everyone else permission to do the same.
In practice, that means the leadership team does its own version of this work before the larger group does. They name where they've contributed to the problem, clarify which agreements they can commit to, and decide how they'll hold each other to them in public. It can feel uncomfortable. Both things can be true: it's uncomfortable, and it's the thing that makes the rest of the process believable.
How to Build Your Own
The most important ingredient is honest conversation among the people who will live with the result. An agreement handed down from the top, or borrowed from another team, doesn't carry the same weight. Once your leaders are on board, the steps are:
Name the problems out loud. Have each person describe what is and isn't working, without assigning blame.
Look for patterns. Group the themes and notice what keeps coming up.
Turn each theme into a behavior. "Communicate better" is a wish. "Name what's still unclear before a meeting ends" is an agreement.
Keep it short. A handful you can actually remember beats a long list no one reads.
Revisit them. Check in at a set point, and let the agreements change as the team does.
Agreements won't fix a broken culture on their own. But the process of naming the problem together, and choosing to be different, rebuilds some of the trust that bad cultures erode. This isn't your fault if your team is struggling, but it is your role to start the conversation. If your team could use a structured way into that conversation, we'd love to chat.