Navigating the stages of team development amidst inevitable change
I love basketball! With the Olympics on there has been a lot of discussion about the USA men’s team vs the world. The gap has closed a long long way since the 1992 ‘Dream Team’ took the floor and pure talent won the day. The USA team has lost a number of tournaments over the years, most recently not even earning a medal in the 2023 World Cup.
One of the points being made is that other countries' international teams are more stable for longer periods of time - from youth right the way through to the international team. While the USA does have youth teams, the sheer volume of talent in high school, college and the NBA means that the same consistency doesn’t necessarily play out over the mid to long term. As a result the USA team theoretically changes more frequently, spends less time together and can be said to lack an identity and playing style. This is highlighted by the relatively young players who made the 2023 team who lost in the World Cup, mostly being replaced by the “big guns”, the elder statesman and future hall of famers making the Olympic team in order to change fortunes.
As I’ve started to ramp up in a new role, the state of teams, creating a true sense of team and enabling a team to get to high performance has been at the forefront of my mind. This discussion on the USA men’s basketball team has reiterated some concepts that have been helpful for me in my career that I thought worth sharing.
On the topic of team development one particular framework that has always stood out to me is the four common stages of team development introduced by psychologist Bruce Tuckman - forming, storming, norming and performing. Last month I wrote about mindset and dealing with ambiguity and change and this model or cycle has helped me in this regard.
Overlaying the stages of team development onto the men’s USA basketball team, the discussion suggests the USA team is more frequently storming and not getting to a stage of performing - or is being asked to get to a stage of performing very quickly in a ‘just in time’ fashion for any given tournament. This isn’t optimal and we can be more deliberate about how we navigate levelling up our teams.
Let’s start with some definitions (courtesy of ChatGPT 4o):
- Forming: The initial stage where team members come together, get to know each other, and start to understand their roles and the team’s goals. This stage is characterized by politeness, excitement, and uncertainty as team members begin to build relationships.
- Storming: The stage where conflicts and competition emerge as team members assert their opinions and challenge each other. This is a critical phase where the team works through disagreements and begins to establish how they will function together.
- Norming: The stage where the team begins to develop stronger relationships and establish norms. Members start to work more cohesively, appreciate each other’s strengths, and agree on processes and workflows to enhance productivity.
- Performing: The final stage where the team operates at its highest level of efficiency and effectiveness. Team members are highly motivated, collaborate seamlessly, and achieve their goals with a high degree of autonomy and mutual support.
It is inevitable that this model is experienced as a cycle. Disruption is caused any time there is some change. On the people front it could be adding new team members (including having a new leader), losing existing people or changes to people's area of responsibility and so on. We could be thrown back into the cycle through changes in strategy or tactics, such as trying to execute things that might be less familiar to the group or when we’re trying to level up, choosing to implement new ways of working. Even in stable teams from a personnel perspective, these types of changes can put us in the team development spin cycle.
Therefore as leaders we are in a constant endeavour of getting our teams to a state of performing, and ideally high performance over and over again while minimising the impact of disruptions.
If nothing else, simply being aware that you are in a storming state, are in it again, or soon may be with anticipated change can help calm the mind and guide your next best set of actions.
Here are five things that I’ve found useful in getting through these stages of team development as fast as possible and reducing disruption.
- Relationships rule - we all know this but it doesn’t always get the prioritisation it needs (and frankly some of us aren’t naturally good at making it a priority). In a virtual world this can be exacerbated but I have found being face to face as much as possible is a sure remedy. When you get face to face focus on the human, do some non work things together and get to know each other beyond the workplace. This will go a long way to creating team cohesion and resilience.
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Recently Cleafy has had a number of events including a 10year anniversary celebration in Italy (company HQ) where we all came together for a weekend of team building activities, great food and commiserating on the Euros. As a dispersed UK team we try and utilise a WeWork in London every few weeks at least to have lunch and just be in the same space where we often end up sharing many personal stories and a good deal of banter. We also made the effort recently to do a planning workshop in person, providing additional opportunity for water cooler chat, team lunches etc. Generally, I like to ensure I have weekly one to one’s with my team and other peers at varying frequencies to ensure I’m building relationships and collecting broad context across the organisation. When you enter the storming phase, these relationships, social capital and the level of trust built will be extremely important.
- Set an operating rhythm - establish a way or set of ways to bring people together regularly and on a consistent cadence. Use these forums to enable information sharing, discuss blockers, collecting and acting on feedback etc. Whatever this rhythm is, be it daily standups, weekly team huddles, quarterly planning or reviews (or all of the above), use them to report on progress, empower individuals, maintain high levels of accountability and continually give context. If feedback arises about role confusion or overlap or conflict, address it quickly and directly. Documenting these things is always useful. Within this operating rhythm identify and establish processes and ways of working that the team agrees on. But be mindful of going process crazy at the expense of delivering value and impact.
In the past couple of months I’ve been working on this with my new team. We have a weekly huddle that is fairly informal - we open with a check in to see how people are feeling and what’s topical; we discuss or follow up on specific actions and topics that need discussing as a group with an open agenda anyone can add to between meetings; and we always end with a weekend whip around to ensure we get that outside of work/human element. In the past I’ve also used these meetings to have individuals give spotlight presentations on interesting work they’re doing that will benefit the group. We’ve kicked off an approach to consistent planning cycles that engage everyone on the team and ownership of process definition is delegated with space for feedback and iteration on something we all buy into. It feels really good when the team can sense the progress and we light that spark that shapes team identity and ambition. Having a good operating rhythm will pave the way to the norming stage.
- Plan - we don’t want to be rigid but without a reasonable plan that articulates what’s important and how we get from point A to point B, the cognitive load on daily decisions goes way up and we’ll be somewhere between storming and norming constantly. Having planning as part of your operating rhythm, and having a plan that aligns people across teams is key to first, creating stability in the event of personnel change (even if all you have is a clear view of what you can’t do due to capacity constraints), and second, to focus minds and enable a team to help each other across key streams of work against an ultimate end state.
As we’ve worked through various planning activities in the past couple of months, making critical decisions about what’s important and aligning with each other across various work streams, a sense of clarity has empowered the team to move forward. The planning process itself is useful to get out of the storming stage as we brainstorm, debate, test each other's ideas and get a greater sense of each individual's mental model, their preferences and so on. Our team feels emboldened by not waking up everyday not knowing what should come next, and being able to see in some visual representation what we’re doing, why and in what sort of sequence.
- Set clear goals - it’s hard to have a good plan without a good goal. And high performance is ultimately about the outcome vs some defined benchmark. The team needs to know what great looks like such that we can all stretch for something ambitious. A solid goal also enables flexibility within the framework of the plan as long as the outcome remains intact. This limits being thrown too far back in the cycle where the specifics of the plan might need to change. Use goals to increase ownership for individuals. And with this, find ways to recognise and reward achievement - milestones along the way as well as our ultimate goals. Shoutouts, positive feedback, development opportunities, promotions as well as monetary or other rewards aligned to individual needs/wants are all available options to leaders.
In our discussions about setting goals the question we’ve asked is “what is the best measure of progress and success” in our current state or in this team or this initiative. In some cases we need additional data and need to build out additional infrastructure, but the team craves knowing what success looks like. Opening these discussions and setting goals as part of planning (even if they're not perfect yet) has been a very good way to move the team through the stages of development. Getting to high performance requires a goal.
- Be transparent - give as much information as possible as frequently as possible and prepare your team to experience change. This might look like sharing hiring plans or upcoming strategic pivots. Let them know that things might get a bit turbulent as we work through some ambiguity. In the absence of information, psychologically our lizard brain will invent some story to make sense of the world. Unfortunately this story is usually the worst case scenario and can cause a range of problems. Mitigate this through regular ongoing communication and broader context. On an individual basis, if constructive feedback is needed, give it promptly and ensure it comes with means of support (coaching, resources etc) that will enable improvement.
With a new team I’ve found this extremely valuable. Through one to ones and other team forums sharing plans and getting feedback early has helped individuals anticipate change and set themselves up for it. Getting to know members of the team I’ve been able to leverage my network to provide additional career development support and coaching and remove as much uncertainty as possible from the equation. All of this has helped us move, what I feel, is fairly swiftly through these stages.
Whenever one of the myriad of disruptive things happen, you should consider dialling up any one of these levers - maybe you need to reinvest in relationships as a team, or to help acclimate new people; maybe you need to adjust your operating rhythm, or delegate; maybe you need to adjust your plan, set new goals etc. Or maybe you have your own style and levers to pull - I’d be interested to hear about them.
It’s even useful to highlight this model/cycle to the team to help them all build additional resilience by being comfortable and aware of how things might look and feel as we evolve and that they should expect some turbulence, to embrace the ambiguity (which I wrote about last month). If everyone can see and acknowledge the situation then everyone can have a hand in facilitating change and improvement. As we scale and hire more people, as teams and as an organisation we will continually go through this cycle - but I feel like we’re ready for it.
As for the Olympic basketball, it’s semi-final time so we’ll soon find out where team USA got to in this cycle. Either way, as leaders we can deliberately work through these stages with our teams, from wherever you’re at today and strive for high performance.
If you are a product manager, product marketer or marketer with a #whateverittakes mindset looking for your next opportunity, or you know one, then DM me. We’re doing some great things at Cleafy and setting a new standard for fraud management.
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5moWritten by a true leader and one of the best managers I’ve ever had
Chief Information Security Officer at VicRoads
5moFantastic article Michael Morris love your work and thanks for sharing!