Forming a team? New team member joining? Starting in a new team?

Whether you’re in a Startup, SMB, or part of the Corporate machine, it’s easy to feel frustrated when your team is behaving like a group of individuals instead of a cohesive team. In this article Michael Doyle and I would like to share with you some easy “How To’s” to get started in building a team that acts as one—a team that is still able to perform through stormy weather.

“Team building is more than just an afternoon of rafting.”—Angelika Goll

Team building is a process of moving together through stages of evolution. We’ll walk you through those stages while providing some easy actions you can take to help your team to move to the next stage.

Let’s begin with a little context. Back in the 60s a guy named Bruce Tuckman identified that groups go through four stages of development. He called them forming-storming-norming-performing (and later added a fifth stage, adjourning) and they’re still relevant today.

The interesting thing is that if you consciously think about these phases in your team, you can take immediate action that will boost your team’s performance.

Over 4 weeks, Michael and I unpacked each stage and shared actionable tips to get you and your team humming along in no time. This article is a complete overview of those posts, including the feedback we received along the way. We’ve also included here the fifth stage, adjourning.

If you’ve come out of a team meeting with the thought, “Why don’t they just get it!” This is a good indicator you might need to revisit the first stage of team development.

Stage 1: Forming.

Often the challenge in teams is that they lack clarity. The team has assembled but they need clear direction. Maybe the objective is known, maybe it isn’t. Either way, it probably hasn’t been reframed by the team, in their own words.

Let me repeat that last phrase, it’s important—in their own words. It needs to be in their own words because that’s how the team members develop understanding and “buy in” to the objective.

Let’s dive into an exercise and see what you could do in 50 minutes to help make that happen:

1. Gather the team and fire up your (virtual) whiteboard.
2. Ask the team to write down their individual understanding of the goal (5 mins).
3. Ask the team to read what other team members wrote (10 mins).
4. Allow the team to ask clarifying questions to each other e.g. “Tell me what you mean by…” (15 mins).
5. Ask the team to write one collective version of the goal (20 mins).

Hint: Break larger groups into smaller sub-groups (6-8 is ideal) and have the sub-groups present at the end. You’ll be able to measure success based on the shift from what the team understood about the goal at the beginning of this exercise compared to how they understand it now.

Your team now has more clarity regarding their goals and they defined it in their own words but after a couple of weeks you might have this thought at the end of a team meeting, “They know the goal, why are they going in circles?” This is a good indicator the team has moved on to the second stage of development.

Stage 2: Storming.

You observe personalities clashing and people disagreeing in meetings over and over again—”Have they not agreed on the goal? Are they still not clear?”

Individuals' expectations of one another are hidden from view and the team probably hasn’t talked about a common way of working (how to communicate, distribute work, run meetings, …) One way to remove assumptions is to help the team create what’s called a Social Contract—a shared document where the team themselves defines how they will work and behave.

Help the team to help themselves. That is how you as a leader want to lead your team, right? Well here’s an exercise to help.

Use the next team meeting to share what you have observed and suggest that some rules of engagement could help. Here’s the best part. You can help the team get their first revision in as little as 15 minutes by doing this:

1. At the start of your next team meeting, tell the team you want to get their consensus on their ways of working. No need to confuse them with terms like Social Contract, just tell them you want to write down how they want to work together. Keep it light.
2. Fire up your (virtual) whiteboard and ask the team to write down what they need from the team to perform at their best. Get them to think about what that might look like for communications, workflow, meetings, and behaviours (8 mins).
3. Get everyone to read all the comments and ask any clarifying questions, “Could someone tell me more about what … means?” (7 mins).
4. Ask the team to sign (or write their name) when they agree on the contract.

Congratulations! You’ve helped the team surface their hidden expectations. This isn’t the end of the work though this exercise will take more rounds of social interaction to get the clarification and agreement needed to happen.

The team will reach a point where you observe them working together, but now you may be thinking, “Why are they just going through the motions? Where’s the innovation?”According to Tuckman, the team is going through the Norming phase.

Stage 3: Norming.

The team has taken responsibility and is now working towards the goal. The danger now is that they focus on preventing conflict over sharing controversial ideas that create innovation. There is enough psychological safety that the team can work together, but maybe not enough to allow them to take risks. Now’s the time to enable the transfer of leadership to the team—meaning the team becomes able to lead themselves.

To transfer leadership you need to help the team learn how to see and act on their own performance gaps. After all, you can’t read the label when you’re inside the bottle.

One simple way to do this is to get anonymous feedback from the team on aspects of their performance and share it back with them.

You can create an anonymous survey in as little as 5 minutes, here's how:

Create a form with these 3 questions:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you believe in the goal?
2. What’s one thing you wish was in the Social Contract?
3. If no one objected, what would be the boldest move you’d make right now?

Aggregate the results and present them back to the team. Ask the team what they would like to do with this information. Help the team to come up with their own decisions and action plan.

For example, “The team mostly scored around 7-8 on the goal question, what would need to be true for you to score a 9 here?”

“It seems there is a theme around workflow missing from the Social Contract, how might we improve upon that?”

“Which one of the bold moves you see here really gets your blood pumping? What would you like to do with it?”

The most important thing to remember is that you don’t step in and make decisions, you need to act as an observer and guide to help the team learn how to best support each other and be innovative.

You now start to observe that the team is motivated, knowledgeable, and able to make decisions on their own. You might be thinking, “Great! My work is done here. Everything seems to be going just fine.” But… unfortunately not quite yet. There’s still work to be done in this stage.

Stage 4: Performing.

The team will want to go back to earlier stages if circumstances change, like when a new team member joins or a complete new work setting, like what we’ve all experienced in the last couple of years because of the pandemic.

The best way to support the team before they go back to old habits, is to help them learn to conduct regular retrospectives—because retrospectives help the team apply the learnings from their own experience. A good team is always compelled to evaluate their decisions so they can apply what they learned.

There are many formats you can use, but a simple format to get started with is Like, Learn, Leave, here’s how you use it:

1. In the retrospective meeting, fire up your (virtual) whiteboard and list 3 columns: Like | Learn | Leave.

• Give the team 10 minutes to add their thoughts to each column.
• What did they like about the teamwork or project since the last retrospective/milestone?
• What did they learn about themselves, another team member, or the work?
• What would they like to leave out from here forward?

2. Group similar answers together and ask the team what they would like to do with this information. (It might be to update the Social Contract, or perhaps add something to the team workflow—whatever it is, it’s important the team takes ownership of the action.)

3. Ask the team when they would like to schedule the next retrospective and who would like to facilitate it. Help the facilitator find a different format for the next retrospective.

Well done. If you’ve been applying what you’ve learned in this series then you’re walking the talk and really helping to equip your team to manage and lead themselves.

Tuckmann later added the fifth stage, Adjourning, and for good reason. There are a couple of key activities you can do as a leader to make the most of this final stage.

Stage 5: Adjourning.

The task is complete and now it’s time for all of, or some of, the team to move on. This is the bittersweet phase where the team is happy to have achieved their objective but also sad that the teamwork and camaraderie they built together is coming to an end.

There are a couple of actions you can guide the team through to help with closure.

1. Celebrate. It’s probably a subject for another article itself, but now is the time to celebrate what the team has achieved and enjoy the moment. This could be as simple as a casual video chat or as planned as a virtual or physical event to mark the occasion. Whatever you choose, don’t let the moment pass you by—these are the memories that make up our lives.
2. Encourage team members to document their achievements. This will help them in future performance and development reviews or applications to other internal or external positions. Now’s a great time to touch up your LinkedIn profile with your latest achievements and experience.

Now is also a great time to reflect on your own leadership throughout the forming-storming-norming-performing stages. What did you learn about yourself? What will you do differently with the next team you lead?

If you’d like to talk about this more in detail, send me a DM.

Links in comment to content:

• How to turn a group of strangers into a team
• Social Contract. Build a constructive, fun team culture
• Retrospectives.Reflect, inspect and adapt ways of working to drive continuous team improvement