Forming
Forming is the first stage. This involves the team asking a set of fundamental questions:
- What is our primary purpose?
- How do we structure ourselves as a team to achieve our purpose?
- What roles do we each have?
- Who is the leader?
- How will we work together?
- How will we relate together?
- What are the boundaries of the team?
If we were to take a logical rational view of the team we could imagine that this could all be accomplished relatively easily and relatively painlessly. And sometimes, on short projects with less than five team members, it is. However human beings are not completely logical rational creatures, and sometimes this process is difficult. We all have emotions, personalities, unique characteristics and personal motivations.
As we saw when we were exploring individual change, human beings react to change in different ways. And the formation of a new team is about individuals adjusting to change in their own individual ways.
Initially the questions may be answered in rather a superficial fashion. The primary task of the team might be that which was written down in a memo from the departmental head, along with the structure they first thought of. The leader might typically have been appointed beforehand and ‘imposed’ upon the team. Individuals’ roles are agreed to in an initial and individual cursory meeting with the team leader.
The team may agree to relate via a set of groundrules using words that nobody could possibly object to, but nobody knows what they really mean in practice: ‘be honest’, ‘team before self’, ‘have fun’, and so on.
Storming
Tuckman’s next stage is storming. This is a description of the dynamic that occurs when a team of individuals come together to work on a common task, and have passed through the phase of being nice to one another and not voicing their individual concerns. This dynamic occurs as the team strives or struggles to answer fully the questions postulated in the forming stage.
Statements articulated (or left unsaid) in some fashion or form might include ones such as:
- I don’t think we should be aiming for that.
- This structure hasn’t taken account of this.
- There are rather a lot of grey areas in our individual accountabilities.
- Why was he appointed as team leader when he hasn’t done this before?
- I don’t know whether I can work productively with these people.
- How can we achieve our goals without the support from others in the organization?
An alternative word to storming is ‘testing’. Individuals and the team as a whole are testing out the assumptions that had been made when the team was originally formed. Obviously different teams will experience this stage with different degrees of intensity, but important points to note here are:
- It is a natural part of the process.
- It is a healthy part of the process.
- It is an important part of the process.
The storming phase – if successfully traversed – will achieve clarity around all the fundamental questions of the first phase, and enable common understanding of purpose and roles to be achieved. In turn it allows the authority of the team leader to be seen and acknowledged, and it allows everyone to take up their rightful place within the team. It also gives team members a sense of the way things will happen within the team. It becomes a template for future ways of acting, problem solving, decision making and relating.
Norming
The third stage of team development occurs when the team finally settles down into working towards achievement of its task without too much attention needed on the fundamental questions. As further challenges develop, or as individuals grow further into their roles, then further scrutiny of the fundamental questions may happen. They may be discussed, but if they instead remain hidden beneath the surface this can result in loss of attention on the primary task.
Tuckman suggests in his review of the research that this settling process can be relatively straightforward and sequential. The team moves through the storming phase into a way of working that establishes team norms. It can also be more sporadic and turbulent, with the team needing further storming before team norms are established. Indeed some readers might have experienced teams that permanently move back and forth between the norming and storming stages – a clear signal that some team issues are not being surfaced and dealt with.
Performing
The final stage of team development is performing. The team has successfully traversed the three previous stages and therefore has clarity around its purpose, its structure and its roles. It has engaged in a rigorous process of working out how it should work and relate together, and is comfortable with the team norms it has established. Not only has the team worked these things through, but it has embodied them as a way of working. It has developed a capacity to change and develop, and has learnt how to learn.
The team can quite fruitfully get on with the task in hand and attend to individual and team needs at the same time.