How can I ensure in Teams that an Admin group is always automatically added when creating teams?

Question

Hi, we are dealing with team owner settings in Teams at our company. How can we ensure that when creating teams in Teams, they automatically include an owner – the security group we created called Project Admins, given that the primary owner is always the one who creates the team? How can we ensure that all future new project teams have this group as an owner? The goal is for project admins to always have access to manage all projects (project teams) in Teams.
Thank you. [Moderator note: personal info removed]

Answer 1

Dear @Adriána Klincko | MetaApp, 

I understand you’d like every newly created Microsoft Team to automatically include your Project Admins security group as an additional owner, so that your admin team always has access to manage all project teams. 

Unfortunately, Teams doesn’t support adding a group as a team owner at creation time. Team owners must be individual users or service principals and team templates don’t carry membership or ownership. The practical way to achieve your goal is to automate team provisioning so that the members of “Project Admins” are added as owners immediately after a team is created. 

Here some advanced workarounds you can consider: 

Option 1: Educate creators to add admins during creation 

If you want to keep things lightweight, you can standardize the creation practice so team creators always add the people in “Project Admins” as owners during setup. 

 

Option 2: A controlled, automated request and approval 

Route all new project team requests through a request-and-approval flow, then create the team and add the “Project Admins” members as owners automatically. 

Step 1: Decide whether to limit who can create groups or teams so requests always go through your flow. 

Step 2: Build the workflow with Power Automate in Teams or from the Power Automate portal. After the team is created, call Microsoft Graph to add each member of “Project Admins” as an owner using the Add owners endpoint. This endpoint accepts user or service principal IDs, not group objects. 

Optionally, create the team from a template to standardize channels, apps, and settings, while the flow still handles owner assignment. 

As a safety net, enable the ownerless-group policy so that if a team ever loses all owners, active members are prompted to accept ownership.  

 

Option 3: Post‑creation automation that watches for new teams 

If you prefer to keep open, self‑service creation, you can run a background job that detects new teams and then assigns your admin users as owners. 

Step 1: Detect newly created teams by either approach below. 

• Use Microsoft Purview’s audit log: search for the “Team creation” activity on a schedule, then process each new team found.  
• Use Microsoft Graph on a schedule: query Microsoft 365 groups where resourceProvisioningOptions contains “Team”, filter by createdDateTime within your time window, then process those results. 

Step 2: For each new team, add your “Project Admins” users as owners via Microsoft Graph 

 

Option 4: Manual or scripted back‑fill for existing teams 

For existing teams, run a periodic script to ensure compliance. Teams PowerShell supports adding owners per user with Add‑TeamUser; you’d iterate through the users in “Project Admins” and add them as owners to each target team. 

Additional information is available in the following resources: 

Get started with team templates in the Teams admin center  

Overview of Microsoft 365 Groups for administrators 

Approvals app APIs - Microsoft Graph  

Add owners - Microsoft Graph v1.0  

Manage ownerless Microsoft 365 groups and teams 

Search the audit log for events in Microsoft Teams 

Microsoft 365 group behaviors and provisioning options - Microsoft Graph  

Add-TeamUser (MicrosoftTeams) 

I completely understand how these limitations in Teams can feel disruptive. It’s not just about aesthetics; these differences can genuinely affect how smoothly you work and navigate your day. 

As a forum moderator, I hope you understand that I don’t have the ability to modify or escalate product issues directly. However, I strongly recommend submitting your feedback through the Microsoft Teams · Community. This is the most effective way to ensure your voice reaches the product team and can be considered for future improvements.  

Once you've submitted your feedback, feel free to share the link here in the comments. I’ll be happy to upvote it to help bring more visibility.  

Additionally, as other users have raised similar concerns and may not be aware of where to share their feedback, I hope this response helps clarify the situation and suggests a potential next step. Highlighting this information can make it more visible to others in the community who may be facing the same issue, making it easier for them to find guidance and contribute their feedback as well. 

Thank you again for your time and for raising this important usability concern. 

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