Team Development Stages

Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, & Adjourning

Our team at Order is brand new. We have people from all over the US remotely working together and previously from different companies with different cultures. They are all in different stages of the first two team development stages; Forming & Norming. For those of you not familiar, all teams go through 5 stages of development according to Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist, who published his findings in a paper titled Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.

Forming is when a team comes together for the first time and gets to know each other. More than just what we own as responsibilities, but also how we like to own those responsibilities. One of the biggest challenges here for our fully remote team is getting that quality time to establish one another's backgrounds. I believe this is easier when teams are in person because they organically find time to chat about things not necessarily work related by going out to lunch together, or catching up in the kitchen or after hours. But when you are remote, you have to do those things through a zoom meeting.

Image via Unsplash.com by Raychel Sanner

I found it helpful to allow for time before and after meetings so folks can just chat about general things that are going on. As a leader, I try to remember that we’re all still strangers to each other for the most part and the only thing that helps a team establish trust is time.

Storming, stage two of the five, is considered the most critical but also the most difficult to go through. It can be riddled with conflict as the individual personalities and work styles clash within the team. Design teams have many different forms of working depending on the partners and stakeholders they worked with in the past. Whether they were previously designing consumer facing apps, a SAAS platform, internal or Enterprise tools, or something unique. It’s important for the teams to speak openly and honestly about the processes we care about and why. As leaders, we should help the team understand the amount of process that is needed so we can scale, and what part of their process is ok to change or be unique depending on their specific team.

I found it helpful to build out a process diagram that explicitly shares the expectation of how we work at a high level, but state out loud that individual workflows and ways of solving problems are up to the delivery teams to establish.

How have you helped your teams navigate the 5 stages?