How to support stages of a team development
You can underestimate the crucial role played by teams. Good teams can work excellent together and study shows that higher positivity on a team leads to higher productivity. Thus, developing a team must not be an option if you’re after more fabulous work experience.
However, you can’t build a team within a single night. You need to gather individuals who have the required set of skills and nurture and develop them to form a group. Thus, a team is the right choice for any company that’s after achieving its goals with less hassle.
But how can you develop a team? Here are the steps you need to follow to make this a reality, considering Bruce Tuckman’s 5 stages of development:
Forming Stage:
Bringing together different people to work as a group is the first step. The primary focus of these people entails organizing the work of the team. Other roles include establishing a schedule and assigning and defining tasks. Also, these members gather data relating to every form of impression.
Storming Stage:
The first stage is the easiest one. The next step has a significant impact on organizational productivity. Here, these members need a guide on when to work as a group and work independently. This stage is critical as it often goes hand in hand with performance losses and therefor the team should be guided through this stage with the goal of passing it as quick as possible. As we are talking about humans this is a challenge.
This step is a storming stage since it involves people literally “storming”. In this case, the members start to arrange as a team and building a team internal structure. In storming stage people start to make their points, check boundaries and competencies. People start to disagree and often heated debates arise.
Norming Stage:
After storming, the norming phase starts and team members come up with their strategy for attaining their goals. The step is a brief period where all individuals focus on developing shared values. Here the members determine the best ways of working together. You can support by facilitation for creating their agreements as well as a being a rule keeper who reminds the team of their agreements.
In this step, the members decide on the appropriate kinds of communication to use. Also, they come up with the best way of conducting meetings and what to do if a conflict happens. All the steps in this stage simplify team collaboration. The reason for this is that the members have the same expectations on how to do their things.
Performing Stage:
The next step is the team members to work as a unit after establishing all the norms. In this stage, the members work on independent tasks with less hassle. Also, this is the step where they find it easy to communicate and assign tasks amongst themselves. In this stage teams usually self-organize quite well and you just need to make sure nothing comes in their way.
It is in this stage where the members reduce all the distractions from the group dynamics. Thus, the team members get motivated in this step to work towards their goals.
Adjourning Stage:
In the adjourning stage, the group breaks up, especially after achieving the goals. After this, the members can move to other activities and goals. In this step, the members need to have created a strong bond and work together without any issue.
In general, stages for the development of an agile team remain to be the same, less or more. However, the variables can keep on fluctuating from time to time.
Additional notes:
The different stages in general go sequentially but their might be back and forth between stages, e.g. from storming to norming and back to storming. Sometimes it is not that easy to figure out what the exact stage at a give time is.
Also keep in mind that each change done to a team might trigger the stages again. Be careful with manipulating a performing team. On the other hand even the best teams after a while need a fresh impulse.
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