Understanding Tuckman's Stages of Group Development

I first learned about the stages of group development in high school. They never really applied to me as a 16 year old, but I always thought they were interesting. As life went along, I was fortunate enough to be placed in leadership positions, both professionally and socially. Through these experiences, learning and understanding the Stages of Group Development helped me create effective and meaningful relationships within teams.

Tuckman's Stages of Group Development is something that most groups will go through. There are 4 stages to group development: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. All of these stages are necessary for a team to grow. Understanding signs of each stage will help you create an efficient and effective team.

Forming

When a team first gets together, everybody is learning about the goals of the team, and how to tackle the tasks at hand. This can be a social setting or a professional setting. This is called the Forming stage.

Members who are part of a new team in the forming phase will act on their own. They are uninformed of the issues and conventions of a team. You can help out other team members by offering your assistance and regular check-ins to see how they are doing.

Mature members of a team will begin to model appropriate behavior in this early stage of development. They have been here before and will quickly grasp the tasks and will attempt to help establish rules and conventions for the rest of the team to follow.

In this stage, you can expect team members to test boundaries, create ground rules, and design organizational structure. To advance the team to the next stage, you must encourage others to break their comfort and speak up to avoid the possibility of extended conflict.

Storming

Storming is the argumentative phase, it's almost unavoidable. Recognizing this stage before it occurs will better equip you on handling these situations. This stage often starts when people begin to voice their opinions, conflicts may arise as power and status is assigned. When team members start to work together, they will establish a hierarchy. As people try to determine where they fit in or assume the same roles, conflict will arise.

A team member can go in one of two directions: fearing responsibility or longing for responsibility. The person who fears responsibility is often more junior in their role, they are afraid to break something. The person longing for responsibility will eagerly accept any power given to them.

Personality conflicts are one of the biggest causes of a team entering the storming phase. The leader of the group must establish their authority and should act as the mediator in these conflicts in order to progress out of this stage. Getting ahead of the curve by quickly establishing what is right and wrong is the best way to avoid conflicts in this stage.

Anytime there is a change in the group dynamic, the forming phase will start again. Some teams never get out of the storming stage and end up being their demise.

Norming

In some cases, a team with a great leader can move quickly through the storming stage and into the norming stage. In this stage, all team members know their roles and are able to effectively assume responsibilities according to their ability. This happens when a common goal is established and the team is in agreement with this goal.

Team members will understand how others work and will tolerate what other members do, even when they may not agree. They accept others for who they are and will move on.

One big pitfall of this stage is members getting too comfortable and are not willing to share their opinions. This could move the team back to the storming phase.

Performing

In rare cases, a team will advance to the performing stage. Every member of the team knows the team's goals and strives to achieve these goals. Team members are now competent and are able to work with no supervision. Members become autonomous and may work on beneficial side projects that, while not directly aligned with immediate team goals, contribute to the overall team's success. This is expected and allowed as long as it's done through the correct channels that are accepted by the team.

Leaders of this team are mainly just participants and only get involved in making the highest level of decisions.

High-performing teams can revert back to any of the earlier stages when faced with a significant change, such as new team members, new challenges, or new conflicts. But understanding where your team currently stands will you guide your team in navigating back to a performing team.