A moderation team is a positive thing. However, you need to recruit people who share similar values.
TLDR; we expelled two people over a period of twelve months and now have a very harmonious community.
Our forum initially had a large number of very loud voices. We implemented a moderation team and moderation guidelines. The guidelines were a set of positives: behaviours that we encouraged. My instructions to the moderation team was that when a post was brought into question, we would ask the poster to explain to us how their behaviour aligned with the guidelines.
The moderation team hated this. They kept pushing for a set of rules, at which they could point and say, “you broke this rule.” I resisted because I wanted our community to be self-aligned toward a positive environment, rather than being punished by “higher ups” for being in a negative space.
As the community manager, I found the kick back from the moderation team to be the most exhausting thing. As they didn’t want to engage in the moderation methodology, anything contentious or disputed was passed to me. Every time this happened, the decision that I made was then questioned by the team. It made my role very difficult.