ThemeThe hybrid setup
CardCard 64 of 65
Questions5 to explore
StepAgree the basics

Purpose & Goals

The reason for the team's existence

A team that cannot say what it exists to do has no shared basis for any of its other decisions.

Purpose and goals are the foundation that makes every other hybrid agreement legible. When the team knows why it exists and what it is trying to achieve, questions about how to collaborate across locations become easier to answer. The meeting format, the response time norm, the decision on when to come into the office: all of these should serve the purpose, not compete with it.

Hybrid teams benefit especially from clarity here because they cannot rely on shared physical space to signal what matters. In an office, urgency and priority often travel through ambient awareness of what others are working on. In a distributed team, that ambient signal does not exist, so it has to be made explicit. A clear statement of purpose and a visible set of current goals replaces some of what the shared room would otherwise carry.

Make it explicitWrite a single sentence describing what the team exists to do, and a short list of the goals the team is currently working toward, and make both visible to every team member in a shared place.

How strong hybrid teams handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are patterns from teams that work well across locations, offered as illustrations to react to, not rules to copy.

Purpose in one sentence

Strong hybrid teams can state the team's purpose in a single sentence that everyone on the team would give the same way. If different people on the team give different answers to 'what does this team exist to do?', that is a sign the question needs to be worked through together.

Goals that are visible and current

Strong hybrid teams keep a short list of current priorities in a shared, easy-to-find location. This is not a project management board: it is a simple reference that lets any team member know what the team is focused on this month, especially useful when someone has been out of the loop.

Purpose as decision filter

When hybrid teams face decisions about how to work (whether a meeting is needed, how to allocate time across projects, whether a norm is serving the team), returning to the team's stated purpose and goals gives a shared basis for the decision that does not rely on seniority or whoever speaks first.

Revisit when direction changes

Strong teams update their purpose statement and goal list when strategy shifts, not just at annual reviews. A goal list that reflects last year's priorities is worse than no list at all, because it suggests nothing has changed.

Questions for your team

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

If you asked every member of the team to write down the team's purpose in one sentence without discussing it first, would the answers match?
How do current team norms and working practices connect to the team's actual goals, and are there norms that belong to an older version of the team?
How would a new team member learn what the team is currently prioritising, and would that process reliably give them an accurate picture?
When the team makes a decision about how to work, does it ever check that decision against the team's stated purpose?
Has the team's purpose changed in the last year, and if so, has the way the team works together changed to reflect that?

Watch for

Teams often have an implicit purpose that everyone assumes everyone else shares. The assumption usually holds until there is pressure, at which point different team members reveal very different ideas about what the team is for.
Goals that live in a project tool no one checks are not visible goals. Visibility means the team can actually find and refer to them without effort.
Purpose and goals stated at the team level sometimes contradict the individual objectives team members are being evaluated on. That tension will play out in behaviour whether or not it is acknowledged.