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Learning how to handle dissonance early strengthens a team and readies teammates to overcome more complex challenges with grace. Skipping this crucial development stage can stunt a team’s growth and delay true harmony. Norms result from the interaction of team members during the development process.

You approach your team to learn about their bottlenecks, roadblocks and concerns. You come to realize that, by involving yourself, they’re burdened by an apprehension to speak up and would rather spend time rectifying the situation. If you reflect on them, they’ll tell you a cohesive story about their strengths, needs and performance. Understand your people’s needs and make team management your greatest strength. Guides & tools Downloadable guides for busy managers to drive performance.

Help your team reach their goals with strong leadership

Ground rules that will govern the team get outlined at the forming stage. Team leaders need to facilitate introductions and highlight each member’s background and skills. Keep reminding the team to check in with each other regularly in person or via instant chat, but stay out of their way. They will waste time and lose their focus if they have to answer frequent, unscheduled questions about what they’re working on.

During the Forming stage of team development, team members are usually excited to be part of the team and eager about the work ahead. Members often have high positive expectations for the team experience. At the same time, they may also feel some anxiety, wondering how they will fit in to the team and if their performance will measure up. Such conflicts can hinder progress and even grind everything to a halt.

The agile guide to winning at team development

Pose lots of questions to your team, even if you think you know the answer. Take a cue from the Atlassian Team Playbook and make time for these three activities. Click the name of each activity below to get step-by-step instructions and other helpful resources like templates and videos. The Atlassian Playbook contains exercises to help teams work through each phase to promote more harmonious teamwork. We each face our own, ever-changing set of personal and work-related challenges and opportunities. These webinars offer research-based strategies, tips, and information to help you be better prepared for whatever life presents next.

• During the forming stage, team members are often optimistic and enthusiastic about getting started.
• This is the perfect team development stage to learn about how your team overcomes obstacles and bonds through shared experiences.
• The team members are now competent, autonomous and able to handle the decision-making process without supervision.
• It’s different for remote marketing teams because you can’t see what people are working on.
• The team may need to develop both task-related skills and group process and conflict management skills.
• Tuckman’s model for group development is known and widely taught among business owners.

Developing an effective team is akin to maintaining a garden. The five stages of team development go a long way in ensuring that your teams thrive and that conflicts are kept minimal. Renowned psychologist Bruce Tuckman created an easily-understood model in 1965.

Challenges have a minimal impact on team performance and morale because members have strategies for resolving them without compromising project timelines and progress. A team’s performance is at peak capacity at this stage because everyone has learned to identify and leverage each other’s strengths team development stages for the common good. During the forming stage, team members are often optimistic and enthusiastic about getting started. They may also be polite and nervous about how the team will gel. The apprehensive behavior usually arises because members are unsure about the project goals and their roles.

Team Development: 4 Stages Every Team Experiences

Ultimately, the goal is to make sure you can provide psychological safety as a baseline, evaluate team patterns of behaviour and notice when you’re in a negative cycle. This is indicated through the project stage which is either completed or very nearly there. This gives them an opportunity to recognize their abilities as well as those of their teammates. Your team asks questions formulated in ways that are rooted in emotional intelligent practices.

You book 1-on-1 meetings with team members to learn about each of their experiences. As you do this, you recognize clear and consistent points with each team member and the benefits of hosting a team retrospective. Your team will experience obstacles in the storming stage. While originally things had been going according to plan, roadblocks crop up during this stage. You recognize that your team is new, and want them to feel supported, motivated and psychologically safe.

Cleaning up the group’s undone tasks and removing symbols of the group. Subgroups and individuals attempt to influence ideas, values, and opinions.  Some recent studies suggest that groups manifest behaviors from several stages at once. We have 30+ experiences to choose from, and thousands of five star reviews. Teams review the last few weeks or months to celebrate their successes.

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Being resilient, laying aside ego and working together will allow the team to meet the challenges and emerge stronger than when they started. Research in Fortune 500 companies shows, for example, that only 29 percent of teams reach the performing stage. As the name suggests, team development entails training and supporting a group of individuals so that they work as a cohesive unit to realize the intended outcome. An excellent example of team development is when colleagues from different departments partner to work on a project.

It might not be possible to plan an in-person meet-up, especially if your projects have short turnaround times. Create an agenda and establish a document to track ideas and comments during the meeting. Share a link to these meeting notes afterwards so that everyone has access and can review it later. Organize the agenda so that each team member has five to ten minutes to talk through their insights and ideas. Allow extra time to review the ideas the team shares and to answer questions.

Initially, during the forming and storming stages, norms focus on expectations for attendance and commitment. Later, during the norming and performing stages, norms focus on relationships and levels of performance. Performance norms are very important because they define the level of work effort and standards that determine the success of the team. As you might expect, leaders play an important part in establishing productive norms by acting as role models and by rewarding desired behaviors. The adjourning or mourning stage of team development is where the group parts ways. The project has reached its natural end, and group members acknowledge that while the group has found success, it is time for the team to split and move on to new challenges.

Signs and questions to look out for in the forming stage

For example, the seven-member executive team at Whole Foods spends time together outside of work. Its members frequently socialize and even take group vacations. According to co-CEO John Mackey, they have developed a high degree of trust that results in better communication and a willingness to work out problems and disagreements when they occur. Explain how team norms and cohesiveness affect performance. Use a collaboration tool like Teamwork Spaces to organize and store your documentation. You’ll be able to access all of your important documents in one location so your team won’t waste time searching for important materials.

Adjourning — Success! You made it

While all phases of team building are important, many leaders consider storming to be the most important stage of team development. During the storming stage, team members encounter initial obstacles and master conflict resolution. This is one of the most crucial points for building trust and forming resilient relationships.

The 5 Stages of Team Development

As you learn about their progress, you ask them questions about their processes and notice how they collaboratively provide constructive answers. How they trust each other to remain accountable for their tasks without dropping the ball. In fact, momentum doesn’t only seem high, it feels favourable. This way, they’ll remain high-performing while re-establishing trusted connections. In this meeting, you take notes from each team member and apply these to your team principles. This way, each employee knows they can trust you, and each other going forward.

When each stage carries through successfully, the entire group will be more in sync and functional. No member of the team will be afraid to ask questions, raise concerns, or propose new ways of performing tasks. Team members usually play to their strengths and help each other out, thereby enhancing teamwork and cohesion in your organization.

Make sure you schedule the meeting at a time that’s as close to business hours as possible in each time zone. This is also a good time to clarify which times zones everyone works in so people don’t have to wait an entire day for an answer to important questions. Establishing group collaboration early on can help reduce the impact of—or even prevent—this stage of group development. This doesn’t necessarily mean that conflicts won’t happen. In fact, disagreement is critical to effective team collaboration. So when conflicts do arise, it’s important to resolve them with effective problem-solving as they come instead of avoiding them.

Scenario: You’re leading your team through the storming stage

This is the second stage of team development, where the group starts to sort itself out and gain each others’ trust. This stage often starts when they voice their opinions; conflict may arise between team members as power and status are assigned. At this stage there is often a positive and polite atmosphere, people are pleasant to each other, and they may have feelings of excitement, eagerness and positiveness. The leader of the team will then describe the tasks to the group, describe the different behaviours to the group and how to deal and handle complaints. In Tuckman’s 1965 paper, only 50% of the studies identified a stage of intragroup conflict, and some of the remaining studies jumped directly from stage 1 to stage 3. Some groups may avoid the phase altogether, but for those who do not, the duration, intensity and destructiveness of the “storms” can be varied.