Team Agreements

A team agreement is a co-created document that defines a team’s shared purpose, working norms, roles, and commitments, built by the team, for the team, at the start of working together or whenever alignment needs to be reset.

Kubair Shirazee developed this team agreements toolkit to give facilitators, team leads, and transformation leads a practical starting point. The resources on this page include a downloadable Team Canvas, real-world examples from enterprise, healthcare, and cross-functional teams, a video walkthrough of the facilitation process, and a Miro template for remote and distributed teams.

The Team Canvas was originally created by Alex Ivanov and is used here under Creative Commons licence. Kubair Shirazee has adapted it for use across agile, enterprise, and multilingual contexts.

Why it matters: Team agreements foster clarity, psychological safety, and alignment, leading to faster decisions, better collaboration, and stronger ownership across the board.

• Team Canvas: Access the Team Canvas to start structuring your team’s agreement. Download a blank template or a completed example from the sections below.
• Video Walkthrough: Watch Kubair Shirazee guide you through using the Team Canvas, covering the facilitation steps, practical tips for agile team agreements, and how to handle the conversations that surface when a team builds shared commitments for the first time.

What the Team Canvas Covers

The Team Canvas guides a team through six interconnected areas: shared purpose (why the team exists), goals (what success looks like this quarter), values (what the team stands for), roles and skills (who brings what), working agreements (how the team operates day to day), and needs (what each person requires to do their best work). Working through each area together, rather than having a manager fill it in, is what gives the resulting team agreement its weight. Teams that co-create their agreements consistently show stronger follow-through than teams handed a completed document.

Example Team Agreements

Enterprise, Healthcare, and Cross-Functional Teams

A completed canvas for a marketing team inside a large enterprise, shows how to define purpose and working norms when a team operates within a complex organisational structure.

An inter-team agreement between Legal and People & Culture, shows how two functions can align on shared commitments, decision boundaries, and escalation norms.

An inter-team agreement involving Finance, useful for cross-functional teams where funding decisions, reporting lines, and budget accountability need to be made explicit.

A completed canvas for a small health and wellbeing business, demonstrates how the framework scales down for smaller, non-corporate teams with a strong values focus.

Free Team Agreement Templates. Available in 8 Languages

Kubair Shirazee has adapted the Team Canvas into eight languages to support facilitation across global and multilingual teams. The versions below are available to download free, choose the language that fits your team’s working context.

download team canvas – Amharic v1.2

Download the team canvas – Arabic v1.2

Download the Team Canvas – English v1.2

Download the team canvas – French v1.2

Download the team canvas – Hindi v1.2

Download the team canvas – Persian v1.2

Download the team canvas – Portuguese v1.2

Download the team canvas – Swahili v1.2

Digital Team Agreements

Remote and Distributed Teams

Miro Canvas for Facilitating Team Agreements for Remote Teams

If you would like to discuss how to facilitate team agreements with your team,get in touch. For further reading on agile leadership and organisationalchange, visit the resources page.