Navigating The Four Stages Of Team Development

It can help to try different tactics to promote teamwork without direct confrontation. Although forming, storming, norming, and performing takes teams on the journey to high performance, team development is not a linear process. As new elements are added or subtracted, the dynamic is altered.

It is at the performing stage where team members really concentrate on the team goals. They are determined to work towards them, as they know what rewards are available to them on completion. They are also aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the team, and they appreciate these, and also work towards developing the weaknesses. There is a good deal of sharing of experiences, feelings and ideas together with the development of a fierce loyalty towards team members. There will be arguments, disagreements and disputes but these will be facilitated positively as the team will now live and die by its rules. The manager at this stage will play very much a non-directive role, concentrating on strategy to plan the next way forward.

This is when the team first meets each other and is on their best behavior. As part of a new group, individuals seek acceptance from their new teammates and try to develop bonds through common interests. It is during the storming stage that teammates must be given the time and opportunity to learn the personality types, talents and tendencies of those they will be working with.

Stage 4: Performing Stage

Remember, over time as new team members join and others leave, this 4-stage cycle starts all over again. This is especially true in our current hybrid work environment – exacerbated by the turnover tsunami that is on the horizon. Every TEAM recognizes that all true motivation is internal, and they push themselves and their teammates to accept appropriate roles and share encouragements. The visit of a sales manager to a sales executive out on their ‘territory’ should be an opportunity for growth and development for the executive, the sales …

If team members exercise understanding, tolerance, and patience, they have a great chance of making it through the most difficult stage. These development stages show up repeatedly on an SAP project, not only when it starts but throughout as phases, deliverables and personnel change. There will be conflict, polarization of opinions, sub-grouping by personality or work style, and a range of discontent from private frustration to flat-out confrontation. Fair warning to team members who don’t like conflict — things will get awkward.

Again, this is an area where I have seen managers lose the progress that they have made with their team. Instead of taking time out to bring a new member up to speed with all the rules, roles and goals, the manager lets the new member join the team without much of a briefing. According to group development theory, team dynamics play a big part in pushing people past average and into exceptional success.

Storm To Perform: The 4 Stages Of Team Productivity

Team development is about investing in your people and ensuring that they become more than just a collection of individuals. Once the manager has got his or her team through the storming phase they have to be aware of a challenge that can come out of the blue. No sooner has a manager got their team through the “storm” then it is joined by a new member who then starts to question the ways of working and potentially starts to destabilise the team.

As the new kids on the block, the temporary creatives may feel insecure about how their work is being evaluated by the team. It’s important for team leaders and management to also model this behavior. A strong team leader is the backbone of every high-performing team. Without strong leadership, teams may struggle reaching the performing stage. By developing your own leadership skills, you can model collaboration best practices and help your team reach their fullest potential. In addition to establishing your team’s mission or goal, it’s also important to set roles for individual team members.

Having worked with hundreds of teams over the past 25+ years and with a master’s in industrial/organizational psychology, I’m very familiar with Dr. Bruce Tuckman’s 4 Stages of Team Development. In agile software development, high-performance teams will exhibit a swarm behavior as they come together, collaborate, and focus on solving a single problem. Swarming is a sometime behavior, in contrast to mob programming, which can be thought of as swarming all the time.

It can be tempting to avoid conflict, but doing so doesn’t help team building. A team that works together to resolve issues will trust each other more. They can rely on each other to do the hard work they were hired to do, despite any differences that arise. Should a conflict ever arise, your team will also know what steps to take to get this conflict resolved. Strong communication skills are the backbone of conflict resolution.

Examples Of Group Activities For Each Stage Of Team Development

A communication plan is an outline of how your team is going to communicate important information to key stakeholders. Clarity on the various avenues of communication allows team members to effectively get work done, understand their roles, and know where to find the information they need about work. Establishing a communication plan can help you do all of these things in a way that’s easy for your team to follow. This is the stage when things begin to settle down as your team finds their groove. As they grow more comfortable working together, team members are more comfortable asking for help completing a task or getting constructive feedback.

It’s important to note that, since you’re dealing with humans, there’s no way to fast-forward to this stage because your team needs time to become comfortable with each other. Trust takes time, and often bonds arise out of conflict, so the storming stage is actually necessary to develop the kind of cohesiveness that propels successful groups forward. If you’re a manager, you can help the storming stage resolve and progress by negotiating compromises among team members. Compromising during the storming stage resolves conflict and pushes the team to forward. Facilitate team discussions and remind team members to be respectful of others’ opinions and comments.

Group Development Theory

As a team lead, it’s your goal to get your team to this stage as quickly as possible. We discuss more about how to get your team to this point below. As a team leader, it’s your goal to support and empower your team to help get their highest-impact work done.

Business has no place to let the odd individual hold things up. That may seem tough coming from a “coaching” manager but this is reality and in many cases management is a tough role. Teams https://globalcloudteam.com/ can move backwards and forwards through Tuckman’s Stages model.Although these four stages take teams on the journey to high performance, team development is not a linear process.

• Performing – when the team starts to produce through effective and efficient working practices.
• As the forming stage is the stage where cliques can develop, the coaching manager should be aware of this and should be aware of the various alliances that will occur at this stage.
• Teams that perform are constantly working out things like communication preferences, recognition of achievements, and workflows.
• Each team will then have one hour to collaborate to create a 15-minute presentation about the facts they uncovered.
• It’s also worth noting that teams can revert to the storming stage when major conflicts or shifts to the status quo occur, like exiting employees or larger company directional changes.
• Stage of team development, consensus and cooperation have been well-established, and the team resembles a mature, organized, and well-functioning machine.
• At times, norming might feel like after-school-special group therapy, but as we discovered in a recent survey, professionalism can’t patch over a team’s underlying emotional connections.

The meeting environment also plays an important role to model the initial behavior of each individual. Members attempt to become oriented to the tasks as well as to one another. This is also the stage in which group members test boundaries, create ground rules, and define organizational standards. Discussion centers on defining the scope of the task, how to approach it, and similar concerns.

Group Development

Group norms have been accepted, and people feel comfortable to exchange ideas and challenge the status quo without fear of misplaced judgement or rejection. As a manager, you’re now familiar with the 5 stages of group development, but your team likely isn’t. If you’ve visualized team hierarchy and processes during the forming stage, you can use those visuals to reiterate how team members should be working together. Team leaders may want to use visuals, such as swimlane diagrams and process flows, with everyone’s roles and responsibilities clearly outlined. Such visuals can be easily distributed to the group and can prevent arguments and confusion.

The danger here is that members may be so focused on preventing conflict that they are reluctant to share controversial ideas. The team is collaborating to meet the original goals and objectives, and the members are excited to be on a high-performing team. In this stage, leadership is shared as the team works toward exceeding standards and continuous improvement. The goal of Tuckman’s Stages model was to help project leaders understand how their team members were building relationships together. As it turns out, people approach tasks differently depending on the quality of their relationships with their co-workers. As your newly formed team starts its journey together, it’s helpful to have some team-building activities to help nurture team members through each phase of team development.

Team Development

Be sure to validate great teamwork early and often, even if it’s even more often now that your team is on top of its game. The scientific term is “social loafing,” and it’s a possibility for even high-performing teams when people get siloed into their specific responsibilities. For teams who can problem solve and find a way to complement each other, the smooth road of understanding and acceptance of the team dynamic is what’s around the corner. Each team member should also try to analyze their reason for inciting potential conflict from the other person’s point of view. Fair warning to team members who don’t like conflict—things will get awkward.

Wearing The Same Uniform Does Not Make You A Team

Alasdair A. K. White together with his colleague, John Fairhurst, examined Tuckman’s development sequence when developing the White-Fairhurst TPR model. They simplify the sequence and group the forming-storming-norming stages together as the “transforming” phase, which they equate with the initial performance level. This is then followed by a “performing” phase that leads to a new performance level which they call the “reforming” phase. The manager must go over again the agreements made by the team during the forming stage and ensure that the understanding is uniform across the team.

Performance Management is a process and a process which if implemented … There continues to be massive coverage in the press just now about how effective the skill of coaching can be both in the four stages of team development workplace and in people’s personal … If managers can demonstrate the skills and are not afraid to trust their employees, then peer appraisal can work for both manager and the team, and work …

Given time, the storming will dissipate, and team members will come to appreciate how individual performance and group performance overlap. Tuckman—a behavioral psychologist—originally came up with his team-building theory in 1965, when his research revealed that groups of all kinds followed a common four-step pattern when forming into teams. Twelve years later, in collaboration with Mary Ann Jensen, he expanded the theory to include a fifth stage, which took into account the disbanding of the team once it reached its goals. Establishing group collaboration early on can help reduce the impact of—or even prevent—this stage of group development. In fact, disagreement is critical to effective team collaboration.

The individual strengths each member brings establishes a sense of teamwork, as everybody plays a part. If you notice a few team members not participating, the easiest thing to do is to prompt them for their thoughts and ideas. Sometimes a little conflict is needed to suss out weak spots in projects, to help team members discover the roles they really want, and push each other to prove out their ideas. But constant storming leads to destruction of productivity, projects, and ultimately, the team itself.

Managing Team Conflict

This is an interesting psychological moment as team members tend to behave independently at this stage. Whilst there may be good spirits and good intentions, the trust won’t be there. Team members have a clear understanding of where they can best serve the team’s needs, and everyone is highly motivated to get to the same goal. Interpersonal pain points are all kinds of awkward but they are not the norm. That comes next, if teams are able to communicate productively and find a way to work together. In these cases, it helps to have a little empathy for the shifting experiences of your team, which make it harder to focus on deep work and can feel unsettling from a job security or validation standpoint.

Stage is when teams begin to develop close relationships, and the group demonstrates cohesiveness. With a better grasp of shared goals and solidified group structure, members will feel a more profound sense of camaraderie and shared responsibility for the project. As you can see from the graphic below, at each stage the team experiences changes in level of trust, knowledge sharing, and ultimately their level of cohesiveness and effectiveness. Read on for my quick tips for getting your team started on the right foot , navigating those challenging waters , and enhancing your team’s “psychological safety” for full team synergy . Now that the team is past the introductory stage, personalities can start to conflict due to differing opinions and approaches.

To ensure that your people truly become a high performing team, you will want to focus on each of the ingredients listed below. Performing – when the team starts to produce through effective and efficient working practices. It can be hard to let go, but great teammates never assume that someone else will handle a problem or catch a mistake.