Chapter 5
Charter a Clear Team Purpose

When you have a sense of purpose for your work, your commitment deepens, your momentum increases, and your performance elevates. In his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us [Pin09], Daniel Pink calls out autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the three primary human motivators. In their book, Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization [KS99], Jeffrey Katzenbach and Douglas Smith list common purpose as the top characteristic of effective teams. And in Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results [BR09], Geoffrey Bellman and Kathleen Ryan support this view in their model of what extraordinary groups need. They write that shared purpose is “the reason we come together...where collective energy and capacity combine to achieve something that could or would never be done by individuals alone.”

As described in ​Setting Conditions for Optimal Team Learning​, a team comprises a complex adaptive system that exhibits a set of conditions: containers, differences, and exchanges. Purpose provides the container for the work. It reinforces group identity. A clear understanding of purpose is critical when you work with others to achieve a common goal. In this chapter we look at purpose, the first of the three critical elements of an agile team charter.