The manager who offers to write the mandate for a new committee, role, or program defines its scope, decision rights, and measures of success, and the body then works within those terms.
An example
Nobody else wanted to draft the charter when the chief executive of a regional gas and water company announced a grid modernization steering committee, so the director of asset management offered. Her two-page draft set the committee's scope as distribution investments over $2 million, gave it the right to recommend and the chief financial officer the right to decide, and defined success as fewer outage minutes per customer and lower cost per asset replaced. It required every proposal to include a condition assessment, which her team ran. She circulated the draft to every future member and asked for edits. Three came back, and she accepted all three. The committee adopted the charter at its first meeting. In its first year, every proposal it reviewed was built on her team's condition data.
Why it works
Decisions are shaped by the premises an organization supplies: goals, information, procedures. Whoever writes a new body's scope, decision rights, and measures of success sets those premises for everything that follows, so the drafter's view of the work looks better and is easier to act on inside the body. Explicit decision roles also make the body itself work better. It depends on the drafter volunteering early, circulating the draft, and writing terms that serve the body's purpose.
The thinking behind it
Herbert A. Simon Administrative Behavior (1947) analyzes organizations as systems of decisions shaped by premises the organization supplies, such as goals, information, and procedures, so whoever controls the premises influences the decisions. A charter is a set of such premises for a new body: its scope, its measures of success, and the data every proposal must include.
Marcia W. Blenko Rogers and Blenko's Who Has the D?: How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance (2006) assigns each role in a decision a letter (recommend, agree, perform, input, and decide) and argues that making these roles explicit removes bottlenecks. A charter that says the committee recommends and the finance chief decides settles those roles at the start, and whoever writes it settles them.
When it fits
Any new standing body, role, or program offers the opening: a steering committee, a council, a new function. You need to be close enough to the sponsoring executive to offer, the knowledge to write sound terms, and the willingness to do unglamorous work early.
How to use it well
Offer to draft as soon as the body is announced, before anyone else does.
- Write a short charter: purpose, scope, decision rights, membership, measures of success, how proposals come in.
- Make the decision rights explicit: who recommends, who decides, who must agree, who is informed.
- Circulate the draft to every member and ask for edits; accept the reasonable ones.
- Get it adopted at the first meeting, before habits form.
Write terms you could defend to anyone who reads them. A charter that obviously favors its author will be rewritten.
What it costs and where it backfires
Drafting is work nobody thanks you for, and terms that serve you too obviously will be rewritten and remembered. A charter that sets the body up to fail will be blamed on its author. Every member has to see the draft and be able to change it; terms hidden from members or slipped past them cross the line.
When it is used on you
Read every term closely when a colleague offers to draft the charter of a body you will sit on. Ask who recommends and who decides, what counts as success, and whose data the body will rely on. Propose edits before adoption, since changing a charter later is much harder.