Mike Rudis, Training Administrator, Office of Performance Management, Delaware Division of Public Health
A team charter is the official document from a team sponsor that empowers the team to act. The Delaware Division of Public Health Process Action Team has used a charter, which describes the mission of the team and how the mission is to be accomplished. If the idea of a team charter is new to you, consider the following analogy:
I’m not a chef, but I like to cook. Over the years I’ve learned to maneuver my way around the kitchen pretty well, but I will always remember one of the first dishes I made. It didn’t have a name, and I had no idea how it would turn out. I just went to the grocery store, bought some of my favorite vegetables, spices, and chicken. When I got home, I unpacked my groceries and eagerly began preparing my meal. I retrieved a skillet from the cabinet, cut and snipped the veggies and chicken, put them all together in the pan with the spices and started to cook them on the only setting I knew – High! Needless to say, this experience was a disaster! The food was burned beyond recognition, my pan was ruined, the odor of burned food reeked through a thick cloud of smoke and, on top of that, the smoke detector was blaring.
Now let me tell the story again using a different scenario…
I’m not a process improvement expert, but my organization has a lot of processes in need of repair. Over the years, I’ve learned how to fix a process or two by putting my firefighter’s hat on and hosing down the problem. For the most part, the fires would be extinguished to a smoldering wet ash and we would begin to rebuild. I remember one of the first processes I tried to help fix. I knew there was a problem, but I had no idea how to repair the damage. So, I got a bunch of people together from the guilty party’s office and tried to hammer out a way for this not to happen again, at least for a while. Needless to say, voices rose, fingers pointed, tempers flared and in the end we argued about who was right and who was wrong and didn’t accomplish much aside from a few bruised relationships and broken trust. In the end we ended up hurting our clients and customers the most.
What does this have to do with using a Team Charter to guide you through a process improvement opportunity? Simply, a recipe is to a cook what a charter is to a process improvement team. A recipe guides a cook through successfully preparing a meal; a team charter guides a team through a successful process improvement opportunity. Both are means to a successful outcome.
Just as master chefs create the perfect recipe by carefully blending just the right mixture of ingredients to prepare a sumptuous meal, the executive sponsor meets with the team to define clear and concise goals and objectives, an aim statement, boundaries, measures of success, constraints and limitations, and available resources and then writes a charter that sets the team up for success. The team charter, when combined with proper use of quality improvement tools, compliments quality improvement opportunities and ultimately makes life easier for the people we serve.
For more information on team charters and to download a team charter template, visit PHF's
Teams Toolbox.
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