Charter your scientific team

Basic project management often begins with a charter—a set of agreements that define the rules and expectations for team collaboration. I believe a team charter can be just as valuable for a scientific group, whether newly formed or well-established.

A group charter helps teams avoid conflicts and offers a framework for resolving them when they arise. These guidelines can set expectations around attendance, meeting etiquette (e.g., lateness, device use), and more. Below is a non-exhaustive list of team charter items and questions that might be relevant for scientific and other types of groups:

• What is the acceptable tardiness for meetings? does prior notice matter?
• How much work-from-home is acceptable? What are the policies and limits?
• Is calendar blocking for uninterrupted work acceptable? By how much?
• Expected response times for emails and direct messages; how to classify urgency.
• How authorship for publications is defined?
• What allotted time acceptable to spend on skill-building, learning, and conferences?
• Note-taking responsibilities; is it important for the team, and should the duty rotate?
• Frequency and length of meetings with team leaders.

Charters can also reflect a team’s core values, which can enhance hiring by helping candidates assess if they are a cultural fit. Likewise, they help hiring managers gauge how well candidates’ backgrounds and mindsets align with team values. These uses serve both for the purposes of evaluating general team-candidate alignment, but also for identifying complementary misalignments that can actually benefit all. Here is a set of core values I have been developing which can serve as an example or inspiration:

1. Passion for Creation

Science and engineering flow from the practitioner into the world, via their hands, voice and gestures. They express themselves through production outcomes, which may take the form of arguments, calculations, devices, simulations, and the like. Our group prioritizes a genuine drive for creative output, free of ego, and striving for daily contributions which are celebrated independently of being small or large. We also target the experimental plausibility or realization of ideas as the ultimate goal of all creation effort.

2. Quality by cultivation

The creative, socioeconomic, or cultural value of the engineer or scientist output is limited by the individual’s breadth and depth of knowledge. We cultivate solid learning practices and a relentless learning spirit, letting information flow from the world into us via our vision, hearing, attention, touch, and smell. We reject using jargon to hide misunderstandings, and strive for knowledge and understanding standards that ensure high quality for all we create.

3. Sustainability as the scaffold

Sustained creation and learning requires a healthy body, grit, a diversity of perspectives, and a respectful environment. We welcome all backgrounds and prioritize well-being and community, fostering connections within the team and beyond. This respect for sustainable practice reflects the accountability we have to society as scientists and engineers.

I’d like to acknowledge that this is not the first version of core values for scientific groups I ever thought about, and probably won’t be the last. Feedback and comments are welcome on LinkedIn, as always.

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