Forming, storming, norming, performing?
Many managers still use Bruce Tuckman’s team development stages as the basis for team building days. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s a short history.
Bruce Tuckman conducted a systematic literature review of a series of published studies on small groups from the 1960s, mostly examining therapy and laboratory training groups.
Working as a Research Psychologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute, he was tasked by his supervisor to analyse these studies because the Navy needed to understand small group behaviour (what I call ‘subcultures’) for future operations with smaller crews.
By 1965 he’d identified consistent patterns across the studies relating to interpersonal relationships and task activity, which he synthesised into four stages (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing). He later added the fifth stage, Adjourning, in 1977 alongside Mary Ann Jensen to account for the dissolution phase of teams. Although we don’t really talk about that one!
Forming is like the awkward first day. Everyone's polite, no one really knows what they're doing, and people are figuring out who's who. It's all a bit surface-level, with lots of smiling and nodding.
Storming is when it gets a little ‘messy’. People start clashing because they want to do things in different ways or else people try to assume control. Egos and personalities clash and frustrations bubble up. This is where teams either fall apart or push through.
Norming is when you've had your rows and now you're actually sorting yourselves out. You've agreed how you'll behave, communicate, work together, be creative and you've built some trust. The team starts to gel and things start to happen.
Performing is when you're firing on all cylinders. Everyone knows their role, there's proper trust, healthy conflict, a commitment to hit targets and work gets done without constant drama. The team's humming.
In my experience, very few teams manage to get to and stay at the performing stage. Most will shuttle between norming and performing, constantly looking for ‘consistency’ or some secret sauce that will unlock repeatability.
Some get there quite by chance. Nothing unites a team like a crisis. Everyone pulls together quickly to resolve the issue, yet when it’s done, things revert to the way they were before.
It’s not that Tuckman’s model is wrong. In my experience it’s a simple way to explain the stages that new teams go through. It’s just that managers assume that the longer a team is together the greater the likelihood that they’ll simply become a performing team. However, time alone doesn't create high performance.
What’s missing to maintain this consistency is a formal team agreement and a commitment from everyone to stick to it. This should be written in the norming phase. Often referred to as a Team Charter of Culture Deck, it is the ‘north star’. A practical description of the culture for team members to own.
This where belonging lives. A written account of everything that we hold to be true. Something to be proud of, to continually evolve and to protect from those that seek to destroy the culture the team has built. When the team owns its culture, it defines what psychological safety means in practice and you don’t have to tell them to be entrepreneurial or to take risks. It becomes perpetually good, seeking ways to continually improve.
Without this agreement, there is nothing to refer back to, nothing to guide behaviour, no basis for expectation setting and therefore no opportunity for the courageous conversations required to maintain progress.
Many organisations try to address this by imposing the agreement; telling people what the culture is, rather than involving employees in the process of defining it. This inevitably leads to a loss of autonomy and accountability (‘it’s not my culture’) and keeps teams in the norming stage as they are never clear what’s actually required to uphold values or practice behaviours.
As I’ve written before, no employee or team wants to perform poorly. Everyone wants to go home after their work, proud of what they’ve accomplished and how they’ve achieved it.
This consistency is only achievable through autonomy over culture definition and a commitment from every team member to uphold it. Then and only then, can it be a truly high-performing team.
