11 nov Four Stages of Team Development What You Need to Know

Though a team leader’s first instinct may be to play peacekeeper and sidestep an argument, navigating conflict resolution is an essential step in a team’s growth. Learning how to handle dissonance identify and describe the stages of team development 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.

This stage is characterized by anticipation as members explore each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, effective group development brings about an increase in productivity, which is the main purpose of the team. It provides a plethora of engagement opportunities so that employees know each other better and are able to build a rapport.

Top Benefits of Employee Training and Development

Instead, they concentrate on the negative feelings they have towards each other and the team at large. This happens because the team members, at this stage, realizes that all of their earlier excitements and high expectations for the team are different from the team’s immediate reality. Apart from being dissatisfied with each other, team members also begin to criticize the team progress.

Members may disagree on team goals, and subgroups and cliques may form around strong personalities or areas of agreement. To get through this stage, members must work to overcome obstacles, to accept individual differences, and to work through conflicting ideas on team tasks and goals. The group development process is important because the system allows leaders to identify the correct stage of development and accurately assess the level of teamwork.

Help your team reach their goals with strong leadership

Ask them to prepare examples beforehand outlining what worked and what didn’t, and then give each person five minutes to share their thoughts. Document the comments so that it’s easy to see which trends emerge and what changes need to be made going forward. When teams work in the same space, it’s easy to see what everyone’s doing. Designers are talking to product managers to get direction, or product managers meet with analysts to talk about user data and reports. It’s different for remote marketing teams because you can’t see what people are working on. If the previous step “storming” is completed well and with minimal repercussions from any negative conflicts, the norming step will be a simple settling down of members and finding their groove.

A communication plan is an outline of how your team is going to communicate important information to key stakeholders. Clarity on the various avenues of communication allows team members to effectively get work done, understand their roles, and know where to find the information they need about work. Establishing a communication plan can help you do all of these things in a way that’s easy for your team to follow. As you build a new team, keep the stages of team development in mind so you can help individual team members reach their full potential and collaborate together effectively. While there’s no one right way to support your team, try these four strategies to boost your team’s cohesiveness.

Clearly set expectations for communication

This is a great time to reflect on what makes a high-performing team able to accomplish tasks and move through obstacles. It’s the time where your team learns about upcoming projects and structures. Here, it’s typical for teammates to feel excited, anxious, and curious about what lies ahead. Identifying each of the 4 stages of team development helps you underscore your team’s needs during each one. Whether you’re building a new team or working on a specific project with cross-functional partners, it’s important to establish your team’s mission early on. Setting a goal, even before you start working together, establishes some ground rules to focus on and ensures that everyone is on the same page and moving towards the same goal.

Each team member will be considering what role they will take in the group, learning where they will work best in the team dynamic. During this stage, most teams choose a leader to delegate tasks and guide the process until the project is finished. To help the first stage go smoothly, make sure everyone has gotten to know the other team members and their work styles.

Common Characteristic of the Storming Stage

In other words, it’s a group-forming model that consists of 5 distinct phases. This is where groups begin to settle into a working pattern, appreciate one another’s strengths and become more effective as a team. When you think of the term team development, a few https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ things probably come to mind. You likely think of how a team facilitates continuous growth, works to develop new skills, and improves performance. What if we told you that the way a team develops is similar to how humans evolve through different life stages?

At each step, it should be remembered that at no point should a leader be focusing solely on productivity. He or she is working with people, afterall and is working to build genuine relationships. A good leader is someone who knows how to build these relationships genuinely and reap the results of productivity as a secondary reward.

Stages of Team Development (including Examples)

For some groups, the idea of getting to know you activities elicits a collective groan. Overly prescriptive or unimaginative exercises can frustrate a team, particularly if it’s not their first rodeo. In this activity from Hyper Island, group members create their own questions on post-its and trade them with other group members as they mingle and break the ice. Broadly, team development can be understood as a framework or series of actions designed to improve the way a group works together. Which means, you may experience these stages in sequential order, or find yourself in a loop with one or more of the stages outlined above.

• If teams get through the storming stage, conflict is resolved and some degree of unity emerges.
• Yet, this model was initially known as the “Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing Model.” Experts often refer to this original model as the 4 stages of group development.
• Also, the leader should try to understand the hurdles to performance and how to overcome them.
• In the Performing stage, the team makes significant progress towards its goals.

Tuckman’s foundation helps team leaders understand how team dynamics change as a project progresses. By understanding the five stages of group development, you can support your team as they’re getting to know one another to quickly enable collaboration and effective teamwork. Reaching the performing stage is a major success and often precipitates some form of team learning.

Art of meeting with your manager

For example, let’s say you used an organization app to plan your day and organize your tasks. Let’s say the team was formed to oversee the development of a particular product and test the quality of the developed products. And you can also use data visualization tools to visualize important data and monitor the team’s performance.