The Tuckman Model

The Tuckman model is widely regarded as a representative view of the stages of team development.  The model is summarised as a chart showing level of team effectiveness / productivity against time.  The diagram below is the most common form of the Tuckman model but the full model has a fifth stage called adjourning.

Forming

The team comes together for the first time.  Everyone is polite to one another and excited to be part of a new project and a new team.  Relationships start to form between team members and there is more social interaction than productivity.  During this time the team is also starting to acquire knowledge about the problem that they are tasked to solve.  They have a common goal that they are all equally working towards.

Teams that are put together for the first time at the start of a project will go through the forming stage during discovery, and assuming that the discovery phase is time-boxed to a few weeks, then it is likely that forming will continue into alpha (possibly for some team members even into beta).

Storming

As time progresses, the team gains a greater understanding of the problem through working together, and as they do they become more comfortable with one another and feel able to provide their own view, and challenge the views of others.  This can manifest in a number of different ways and often causes friction in the team.  But being able to feel comfortable enough to voice opinion and to challenge, be challenged and resolve differences of opinion is critical to team development.  It helps to build relationships and bring cohesion to the team, setting out each persons role within the team.

Storming usually doesn't start to occur until individuals within a team have had a chance to voice their opinion on a matter of which they regard themselves as an expert.  Often this may be even later when they start to demonstrate (through carrying out a typical task for their role) their expertise in their role.

For many teams that follow a phased approach to delivery, storming often is first seen during the alpha phase and can carry through into beta.

During storming the team is at the least effectiveness as they are often distracted by the issues with the team dynamics.  The key to successfully negotiating the storming phase is for individuals to recognise that that is the phase that they are going through and to focus on the problem together (not the individual relationships).  The issue is often not about personalities, but about about how individuals have tackled similar problems before and changing to how they now need to tackle the problem at hand as part of the current team.

Norming

Once a team has been together for some time, relationships have been built and individuals places within the team have settled, the team feel generally comfortable with one another, and move into the norming phase.

During the norming phase the team the team starts to work together collaboratively and we tend to see a rapid increase in productivity.  The team dynamics are good, individuals are able to get on and play their part, utilising their skills within the current team, aiming towards the same shared goal.  The team are not yet working at an optimum level, but are working towards it.  They are able to work out together how to overcome a problem or issue and progress together towards their goal.

But norming can also be precarious.  Small things can often imbalance the team and knock them back into storming.  The severity of the impact is often related to the type of cause of the imbalance.  If the cause is generated within team, perhaps related to how the team is approaching how they solve the problem, or with the details of the solution itself, then usually the team can work that through themselves.  If the cause is applied to the team, then often the impact can be more significant and can cause the whole team to move back into storming.  A common cause of this type is changes to the composition of the team.  Changes in team composition have a far greater detrimental effect on a team than is often thought and is much more than accepting that a team might be less productive while they support a new team member for example.

Performing

Teams move into the performing phase when they are able to work at a constant pace continuously and most problems are overcome with ease.  The team has already encountered similar problems and the team works at such an optimal level that even new issues are dealt with effectively.

Not all teams make it into the performing phase and it can take a long time to be reached.  For teams that make it into this phase the relationships amongst the team are well formed, everyone understands each other roles, individuals strengths and weaknesses are well understood, compromises and sharing of workload are commonplace.  The team regularly and openly comment about how much they enjoy working with the team and shout-out to one another as a way of recognition of good work.

The team are able to seamlessly deal with problems, but changes to the team composition are still risky and are likely to cause the team to slip back into the storming phase.  However, the experience of building the team through norming and onto performing usually help to move the team back towards performing quickly.  But the risk of never making it back into performing does exist.

Adjourning

The final phase of the Tuckman model is the adjourning phase.  This is when the team is no longer needed as the teams goals have been reached so the team is disbanded.

For pieces of work where the team is in place for a finite period then the adjourning phase applies - this is the case for traditional projects.  However, generally agile teams are created and built to deliver a product and/or service from cradle to grave.  The approach aligns much more with a product lifecycle approach, rather than a project, change implementation approach.