Building a Self Charter

Welcome to a five-part series on Self Charters, an exercise in self-management and personal accountability.

In this series, we'll explore how to design a charter that helps clarify values and establish a framework for guiding one's actions. A self charter is a personal compass that empowers you to navigate your expectations of yourself. What's more, it illuminates expectations you might suddenly realize you have of others, be they reasonable or unreasonable. Each post will dive into a different aspect of crafting your own charter using a framework I've continuously refined over the past 5 years. Finally, I'll demonstrate each section using myself as the test case. What better way to tell than to show?

If you give this framework a try, feel free to share your experience and feedback in the comments.

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A team charter is a document that outlines the purpose, objectives, and guidelines for any team collaborating to achieve a common goal. More simply, it lays out the rules of engagement and clarifies how a team defines success.

My approach to team charters was ignited by Mural's article several years ago. Since then, I've riffed on their idea to facilitate team charter creation for a variety of cross-functional teams, refining the approach based on the learnings from each iteration.

Based on all of those learnings, I decided to look at myself as I would a team within a company. In this exercise, I get clear on what I value, how I behave, how I measure success, and how I define quality. The result is a self-charter that empowers me to stay true to myself in my work and my personal life.

Self-charter sections

• Core values: What do I believe?

• Norms: What behaviors do I normalize?

• Necessary roles: What are and are not my responsibilities?

• Success measures: Is the work working?

• Quality standards: How do I define and sustain quality?

It's important to note that any self-charter is an evergreen work in progress. I plan to revisit these posts often to hold myself accountable to their commitments but also to ensure they stay up-to-date as I receive a continuous influx of new information.

Let's begin.