Two more scales complete the picture. On trust, some people build it mainly through doing reliable work together: you trust me because I deliver. Others build it mainly through personal relationship: you trust me because we have come to know each other. On time, some people treat schedules and deadlines as fixed commitments, while others treat them as flexible and responsive to relationships and changing circumstances. On a DHS team, these differences can show up as frustration over meeting start times, over whether small talk is wasted time, or over when a deadline is truly a deadline.
The leader's job is not to pick the right style and enforce it. It is to design practices where expectations are explicit, so that no single style is the invisible default. Brett and colleagues describe four strategies for multicultural teams: adaptation, where members acknowledge cultural gaps and work around them; structural intervention, changing how the team is organized; managerial intervention, setting norms early or bringing in a higher-level manager; and exit, removing a member when other options fail. In public service, exit involves HR, labor relations and due process and is never a shortcut around a style difference. The most useful everyday tools are the first three, and a team agreement is where they come together.
A good team agreement is written together, not handed down. It names norms for each area where styles differ: how meetings start and end and what happens when someone joins late; which deadlines are fixed by law, contract or leadership and which are working targets; how feedback is given and how importance is signaled; how disagreement is raised, including written and private routes; who decides what; and how the team builds relationships, such as a brief check-in at the start of meetings that people can join or skip. The agreement should respect what the team cannot change on its own, such as hours, telework and scheduling provisions set by HR policy and collective bargaining agreements, and accommodation processes led by the ADA coordinator.
Accountability makes the agreement real. Review it at set intervals and when the team changes. Ask anonymously whether the agreement is working and for whom. Notice whose participation has changed. Leaders should hold themselves to it first, because a supervisor who ignores the agreement signals that it applies only to others. Erin Meyer's advice fits here: expect the work to be hard, look at your own style from others' positions, find the value in other approaches, and keep adjusting. A team agreement is a living tool, not a finished product.
