The Five Stages of Team Development

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Team learning is often necessary to execute healthy team development and providing your team with the tools they need to thrive is good for them and your organization. These tools may include team development discussions, training, or workshops. Allow the https://globalcloudteam.com/ team to provide constructive feedback to the team leader, the HR team, and any other relevant staff members not directly on the project team. This stage occurs when team members are adjusting to each other and settling into their roles on the project.

Why Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development is Helpful

The performing stage is when your team is truly interdependent. Teamwork and creativity is at an all time high, and team members step up to take ownership over multiple parts of the project. Leaders provide little direction, meanwhile team members share new information and solutions constantly. In this stage, everyone is working towards the team’s goals, and group cohesion is at an all time high. The ideas are openly shared between team members, and the imposing personality starts to highlight more.

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. As a team leader, it’s your goal to support and empower your team to help get their highest-impact work done.

How to help your team through the stages of group development

Understanding the five stages and how to keep your team moving through each of them helps bolster productivity and foster a creative and collaborative team. While the norming stage sounds ideal, they must move on to the performing stage for true interdependence. To facilitate this group development, leaders should continue to give constructive feedback and support, and make collaboration as easy as possible. At this stage, things are going so well that team members might fear the break up of the team if further risks and innovations are taken. Encourage your team to continue to break out of their comfort zone to achieve better results. When the clouds part, the group moves from the storming stage to the norming stage of group development.

The team seamlessly trusts, collaborates with, and supports one another. Everyone knows their job and has faith in each other’s abilities. A deep understanding of each other’s communication preferences and work habits means that any internal conflicts are limited and managed effectively, even without a manager’s oversight. Team members now see each other’s differences as strengths—everyone fits and has a role to play. Whether in person or via Zoom, the forming stage of team development remains relevant, as team members need to get to know each other and be assured of each other’s skills.

How to navigate organizational change

Conflicts are easier to handle, as people exchange feedback and ask for help. In order to handle the many changes facing the workforce, leaders must strive to be as adaptable as possible. Managers must strive to become adaptive leaders—leaders who prize creativity, collaboration, integrity, and innovation.

• Make sure everyone steps back each day or week to take a look at the larger picture.
• A sense of belongingness is established and the group remains focused on the group’s purpose and goal.
• There is a clear and stable structure, and members are committed to the team’s mission.
• Tuckman’s theory is that every group moves through four stages on its way to becoming a high-performing team.
• Most high-performing teams go through five stages of team development.

This leads to a period known as storming—because it can involve brainstorming ideas and also because it usually causes disruption. During the storming stage members begin to share ideas about what to do and how to do it that compete for consideration. Team members start to open up to each other and confront one another’s ideas and perspectives. The stage of group development when team members have productive relationships and are able to communicate and coordinate effectively and efficiently.

Risk Management

Understanding the stages of team development enables you to build successful and high-performing teams. Supervisors of the team during this phase are almost always participating. Even the most high-performing teams will revert to earlier stages in certain circumstances.

Frustration, annoyance, and anxiety tend to arise as a result. Team members need to learn to use conflict positively so that it doesn’t slow or hinder their progress. 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.

The Challenges of Great Teamwork

If these changes – and their resulting behaviors – are recognized and addressed directly, teams may successfully remain in the Performing stage indefinitely. Team Tasks during the Storming stage of development call for the team to refocus on its goals, perhaps breaking larger goals down into smaller, achievable steps. The team may need to develop both task-related skills and group process and conflict management skills.