Building Strong Teams: Navigating the Stages of Development

Welcome back. As you reflected on your work setting, chances are pretty high that you are a participant in both work groups and teams. As a recommendation, what we lean towards is, is there a way for within our unit to develop a strong team identity, a strong team spirit, a strong ability to work collectively? And then when we do need to be more work groupish, we could do that pretty easily.

It's harder to work in groups and then say, Oh, and now you have to work on a collective work product. Well, that takes a lot of transition energy, does it not? Because now we have to create a different mindset. We have to create a different way of looking at each other and a different way of participating together.

So if there were an ideal, we would have groups that identified as teams that are independent and knew how to do that extremely well when they needed to, and then could move back out into being that work groupish type, more individualized, but easily come back together into the team. Again, we're constantly evaluating the work group or team. Now, as we move forward, we're going to concentrate more on teams and what it requires of us as leaders to develop strong teams. And what you're going to see here is the five stages of team development.

You may be very familiar with this already, but let's take a look at this, and it might be a review for you, or maybe this is new information. The five stages of team development actually came from a psychologist, Dr. Bruce Tuckman, and he developed these back in 1965. And you might say, Debbie, what do I care about research that was done in 1965? Well, because we're still talking about it today, and the updated research keeps supporting it.

And the reason I feel a need to talk about Bruce Tuckman is that he was a professor at Temple University, and you know I'm a Philadelphian-ish, I live in the suburbs, and so Temple University is a center city university, and we're very proud of the connection to Bruce Tuckman. And his work originally identified the first four stages that you see here on the chart, and a journey was added a bit later. It almost rhymes.

Now, what we are saying here, or what Tuckman was saying here, is that each of these stages represents a different process that comprises reaching the group's goal. And so if ultimately we want to get to performing, what Tuckman's research also said, and this is critical, is that a group must develop through the stages in order to become a high-performing team. He insisted that you can't skip the stages, that you must work through the stages to really get to that key piece that we call a high-performing team, a highly productive team.

So when we are forming, this is where the people who are brought together, and they're really just a group, even though we're calling it a team, they're really just a group because they hardly know each other. And there's usually a group leader, and the group leader is pretty directive in the early stages of this formation of a team. And people are very polite and positive, and you can tell you're in the forming stages because you're doing things like introductions and icebreakers.

People are usually pretty polite, and there is a heavy reliance on the group leader or the team leader to manage the discussion. There's a focus on identifying why you were brought together, and starting to look at why we are here and what kind of things we are going to be expected to do. But as you're beginning, you can see that it's a little agreement because you don't have anything to agree or disagree on yet.

You're still trying to figure it out. You may be sitting there going, I don't even know why I'm on this team, but maybe I need to hear why. And leaning into the leader for guidance and direction.

As you start having conversations about what we are here for, this is where we get into, uh-oh, conflict. And the conflict may be very mild or it could be pretty strong. And the contention comes out of group members starting to get comfortable enough to speak up.

And group members might be trying to establish who they are in the group. And there might be some who want to establish more power and authority. I'll go back to Eldred's strategies, if you will.

There may be others who think that they should be the leader and not the leader. Uh, there may be people who only want one way of doing things. And so these, these stronger personality types start coming out in the storming.

And at the very least, different points of view start coming out. Uh, so you kind of have to work through this. Now, some of the storms, like I said, could be very mild.

And the group is amenable enough to work on clarifying their purpose, uh, putting power struggles aside because they're so mature. Uh, and the team leader is coaching the group through the discussion. There are cases, however, where the storming can get so bad that the group never moves on and just disintegrates.

So we can go from one extreme of, oh, we got through that pretty easily, to, well, you know, we got through that way. And then there's a lot in between as well. Uh, but hopefully you move through storming.

And the reason this is critical is because you learn how to deal with differences in the storming phase, which becomes really important as you move to norming and performing. Again, if the conflict is identified as healthy and used as healthy, you can get through storming more easily. If it becomes unhealthy, it can mean the demise or less success of the team.

But let's assume you got through the storming. And as you're breaking through, it's kind of like breaking through, uh, and you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you start realizing that your team, uh, understands, uh, each other's roles and responsibilities. Uh, this, the team now has some norms by which they operate, uh, and, uh, there's more agreement and consensus.

The team leader is more of a facilitator now because people are getting the idea of, I know what I have to do and by when I have to do it, and what my contribution is going to be. Uh, and, uh, you start to be productive in the norming phase, that feels good to be productive. Uh, the team might start socializing a bit more in their conversation or outside of the professional setting.

That's not always the case, but it could be something that starts happening when groups are norming. Now the norming phase can last a really long time, and some teams never get to that real high performance, but let's remember norming does produce some, some output. It has output.

So it's not a fail. It just means it didn't; if it got stuck in norming, it didn't get to its fullest potential, but that's not necessarily a terrible or bad thing. However, what we really want to see, uh, is to get to performing high performance.

And when we get there, this is where, uh, the team members really spend a lot of time because they're, they have a very clear vision and purpose. They have a very high focus on goal achievement. That esprit de corps, that camaraderie, has really, uh, sunk in and kind of connected everybody.

Most of this is about delegation, uh, uh, from the leader, uh, and the leader can look more like a team member when you're high performing than like a leader, if you will. Uh, the, there's completion of projects during this stage and, uh, it's, it does lead to goal achievement. What it also leads to, because it says esprit de corps here, not only a commitment to the goal, but a commitment to each other, members of the team.

And that's really exciting when you realize that the relationships here go beyond just the goal, that in fact, there has developed a true respect has developed among the team members. Uh, each member feels valued by the team. Uh, and there is a lasting connection that you will take beyond the end of the project.

A journey was added later, uh, but it is about the task completion. Uh, people sitting around going, Wow, look at what we did. That was pretty cool.

Uh, getting recognition for what they did, but then also saying goodbye because maybe this team isn't going to be a standing team. It was only brought together for a very clear and specific purpose. Uh, so these are the stages of team development.

Now, remember what's really important from Tuckman's research is that teams must go through the stages, and they go through these stages in order to actually get to the high performance and produce a high-quality product at the end. All right. So, your team, what I'd like you to do is, uh, assess the current team that you're on.

And maybe it's still just a work group with a desire to be a team, but you're going to see 11 survey statements in, uh, in your resource material. And what you're going to do here is use a scale of one to five. One is that not at all, five is mostly, most definitely, uh, rate your team.

So for instance, uh, the first statement, as you will see, says my team has clear goals. Is that a number one, uh, two, three, four, or five, one being not at all and five, most definitely. And you will do that for the 11 statements based on the responses that you see there.

What stage of development do you think your team is in? Is it stuck in storming because I just can't get out? Are you over-enorming because you are actually productive? Are you still way back in forming because it's so new and just, you're not really clear on what everybody's doing, how they're doing it? Are you way over in performing because you're pretty much on automatic and, uh, there's that high trust within the team that yes, we can do it and we can do it together. Uh, now you're going to evaluate the stage of development, but also to what degree are you satisfied with that current stage? And if you're a brand-new team and you've only just gotten started, I think it'd be unrealistic to expect you to be high-performing. So you can be satisfied with where you are at forming, or you may even be in storming, and you're saying, yeah, but we're handling it very maturely.

And so we're working through it, but I'm not upset by it. I'm, and I can see that we're going to be able to get through this and get to norming. So again, it's not about whether this stage is the right one or the wrong one, but are we satisfied? Are you satisfied with where your team is at the moment that it's in? They take a few minutes to work on that.