Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing (how teams develop)

Welcome to (un)leaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. In this episode, host Barbara Iverson talks about team development stages based on the work of Bruce Tuckman. Understanding how teams do (and don't) develop is key to creating safe and productive work environments.

Barbara tells stories from her life and looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. Every week she offers a challenge or task for listeners, to prompt reflection or growth. This podcast is the perfect listen for someone who feels like they don't quite fit to the typical leadership profile. 

Love that you found the podcast! To help others find us would you take a minute to leave a review wherever you listen? Thanks!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So the sooner you can move from nor from forming, I get so caught up in these names. Hello and welcome to Unleaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. I'm your host, Barbara Iverson. Today we are going to be talking about team development stages, specifically those researched and named by Bruce Tuckman. If you are not sure what I'm talking about, they are forming, storming, norming, performing. There's also an additional one called Adjourning, but I'm going to mainly be talking about the four that rhyme. A number of years ago, I was living in Prague, and a guy I knew was putting together a festival, a three-day festival. I actually can't remember the name. Festivals were a huge thing in the early 2000s. And he wanted to have these different tracks that attendees could go to. And one of them was going to be film. And he asked me and another woman to lead that team and figure out what we were going to offer for this three-day festival. And I was super excited to do this. I was leading a movie club at the time with teenagers. So really absorbed into the world of movies. And I was like, okay, this is super fun. And basically he told us, okay, this is your two, like you two, this is your thing. Go do it. He gave us very little. We had a small budget, but there was very little guidance. I didn't, I didn't really know. I mean, I had some ideas of what I wanted to do. And I didn't know my partner very well. We met a couple times and sort of talked about some ideas. And as we were going, I had ideas of things that I wanted to do, but I would sort of get stuck thinking about the things that were overwhelming me that had to be done, but I didn't want to do them. So, for example, my partner had found this movie about women during communism that had played a certain role, and the filmmakers had found some of these women and interviewed them about their experience. I honestly don't remember that much about it. But I do remember, I thought it was a great idea. I thought it was a cool thing that we would show. But then the woman that I was working with was like, oh, hey, and we should contact them and um we should see if they will come and talk with us or be part of the festival in some way. And she had all these ideas, which seriously to me scared the crap out of me because first of all, my Czech was not great at this time. Like the festival was going to be in English, or at least a lot of it was. So that was that was not stressful to me. But thinking about talking with these women or arranging or like doing the logistics of this, that's not really my thing. I was much more focused on, hey, let's do movie club, but uh like on this bigger scale. And I had teenagers that I knew from Prague who I was gonna invite to come and actually lead that because we'd been doing movie club for so long, they were really good at it themselves. I guess movie club might be a whole other episode. But essentially it was teenagers coming, watching movies with me, and then talking about them. And through that process, there were two different movie clubs that went on for a number of years. And like from when they were in high school age through university. And we watched so many movies, and we all really learned together how to talk about them meaningfully, like to talk about their perspective, the perspective of the film, what was going on, really sort of deep dives into them, not the surfacey type stuff. Like if it was sort of a message movie, that wasn't what we were interested in. And we were more interested in, I don't know, as an example, a movie like Magnolia or the Big Lebowski movies that take a little bit more effort to understand or discuss. But anyway, I digress. So I had plans for content, and she had other ideas, and each of us was pretty supportive of it, but I think both of us were feeling extremely overwhelmed and kind of we were just sort of, you know, tiptoeing around each other. Like I said, we didn't really know each other very well. And finally one day she said, Um, I need to be really honest with you. I'm super excited about doing having these women come and talk with us and, you know, talk about their experiences based on this documentary that was made about them. I'm totally excited to like do the logistics of that, invite them, blah, blah, blah. But I'm really worried about this content. And when you're talking about this movie club thing, like I don't, I don't know what that is. I don't know, I don't, oh, I'm I'm very overwhelmed thinking about it. And I thought, oh, oh, what you are overwhelmed by is what I am so excited and love and know how to do. And what you are excited to do is what is overwhelming the crap out of me. Huh. And after that, after that conversation, we worked together so well. We had so much fun. The film track of this festival was a blast to do. People really enjoyed it. It was it was so fun. And I remember thinking, I am so glad that she said that in our in that conversation, that she like had the courage to say, I'm uncomfortable and I'm overwhelmed. And I I don't really think I can I can't do all of these things because of course she didn't have to. I was there, but I was feeling overwhelmed about my own stuff. This was one of the first instances that I can remember in my life of working on a really high-functioning team. Now it was just two of us. But it was this magical moment where we were clear with what we liked and what we didn't like, and we were cool with saying that to each other, and we trusted each other that we had such different personalities and skills that we really complimented each other. Like we became really unafraid to say what we were feeling and how we were feeling, and let the other person step up because they did. It was incredible. And I have not often worked on teams where we've found that sweet spot. The bigger the team, the harder it is to do that. But I have worked on other teams where people start to get to know each other and recognize strengths and weaknesses and how the others' strengths and weak strengths and weaknesses complement theirs. The team that I worked in when I first moved to Berlin was just tipping our toes into that water and it was starting to feel so good. And then the team changed, which is also pretty normal. But in workshops where I've talked about these stages, I've often asked people at the beginning how many of them have been on performing teams. And a lot of people at the beginning of these workshops will raise their hands and say, yep, yep, yep, yep. And I know that what's in their minds is they have produced products, they've been on teams that are high functioning and spit out whatever product they were trying to build, whatever that was. And the interesting thing is at the end of the workshop, when I asked the same question, okay, tell me again, now that you have all this information, how many of you have worked on performing teams? And then it's only a handful of people, just a smattering of people raise their hands. Which is in a way, it's sad because working on a performing team is so fun and so exciting, and just brings so much joy and value not only to the product, whatever you're creating together, but also just individually, it's fun. It's I think it's also typical. It's it's kind of to be expected because teams are complicated because they're made up of people. When people know each other, value each other, know how to talk to each other, know what each other is good at, and know how to communicate feelings and what's going on, it's fantastic. But most of the time that isn't really the case. So let's get into it. What are the four team development stages that Bruce Tuchman named? Forming, storming, norming, performing. Again, adjourning is also one. I'm gonna cover it when we get to that part, but it's not my main focus. Let's talk about forming. Forming is anytime you have a team, it's what happens when you put people newly together to work together. But it doesn't have to be just a team that is new in working together. You can have teams or companies that are still in the forming stage that are 20 years old. How do I know? I worked in one. And the way that I would categorize it is it's any team or organization that isn't talking about their problems. It isn't talking about the discomfort that people feel. They are more concerned with keeping it harmonious, maybe focusing on the product instead of the people, saying things like, we're a family. Because those of you who know, and a lot of people have already, there's been a lot of commentary on this, and I agree. Companies are not families, you don't want to be a family. Families you don't choose, and families tend to be highly dysfunctional, and you can't get rid of your dysfunctional family members. You can't just fire them, you can't toss them off the boat. Families are there as something that you can't change your family. You can have a chosen family. We're not talking about that. But the family that you're born into, you didn't ask for, you didn't choose it, and you have to go from there with what you do with it. That is not what a company is like. That is not how a company functions, shouldn't be, anyway. And you don't want that kind of dysfunction that you can find in a family because they're all stuck with each other and didn't choose each other. You don't want that in a company. But this is why I say that I think they're in the forming stage and they're immature and not well performing, is because that's a super naive way to look at it. And it's this sort of blanket, it's trying to get people to shut up and not talk about what's uncomfortable or what's not working at the company. Then the founders and and directors and leaders will say, like, oh, we're family. I think that's really a bit of a it's a dodge of accountability. It's trying to make people think that the that the company or the team is much more caring and concerned about their well-being than they actually are. Because the assumption is if we're a family, then oh, we care about you. And we really do, even when their actions say something completely different. Actually, a better way to talk about a company that's functioning well is we're a team. You think about a sports team, you think about a team of people, maybe a theater troupe that has a goal. They have come together because of their skills, that they complement each other. They have different roles that they play within that team and they work together to achieve a common purpose. Wouldn't you rather be a team or a troupe than a family? And not everybody has good family experiences. Keep that in mind too. Sometimes you can say we're a family, and that brings up a whole lot of baggage and discomfort in somebody. But thinking about it as a group of people who are trying to achieve a common goal with different roles within that group, that's fantastic. Companies that haven't taken steps toward founder or C level or director accountability are also teams that are forming. And I would say, again, immature. Immature companies, immature teams. When there's no accountability and the leader of the team is able to do whatever they want, the leader of the company is able to do what they want, there's no opportunity to give feedback, certainly not safely. I've worked in companies where people started giving feedback, and what happened? They got fired. They shouldn't have been because they were in most cases just asking questions, but they were asking questions that the people above them found very uncomfortable. And instead of dealing with the questions, they dealt with the person. Boop, got rid of them. Now we're fine. Well, no, you're not. But if you can blame the person who left, there were women who they were called troublemakers, and they were fired. And then other people look around and go, I would really like to keep my job. I'm gonna keep my mouth closed. So this is a team or a company that's in the forming stage. Storming. Now, when I taught this to university students, storming, they you could just see their eyes grow wide and they were terrified. Because the name makes it sound terrifying, scary, painful, uncomfortable, and just all the things that you really don't want. So everybody wanted to like skip over it. Could we just skip norming? Sorry, could we skip storming and go to norming? The answer is no, you can't. But the good news is the sooner you get to storming, the easier it is, and the more smoothly you can tend to get through it. Storming is basically people starting to speak up to say that they are uncomfortable and someone listening to them. Because I would say if it's just people speaking up, but they get fired or they get removed somehow, you're still informing. Storming takes someone listening and saying, We've been doing this in a way that we need to stop. We need to start, we need to change what we're doing. So the sooner you can move from nor from forming, I get so caught up in these names. The sooner you can move from forming into storming, and again, storming can be very short because the next stage is norming. And that is the process of making rules, finding accountability structures, creating new processes, listening to the feedback and finding ways forward. So if you if you understand that, getting from this place of like, oh, everything's fine, to okay, what do we need to do? What that takes is suddenly a few people, or maybe not even suddenly, but a few people starting to say, This is not all right, I'm not okay with it, and someone else saying, Okay, then let's make changes. It can be very, very short, but it often isn't because in those companies that are immature and still in the forming stage where you do not have accountability for the founders slash C level slash directors slash whomever, they will hang on by their fingernails rather than face the fact that they need accountability structures and feedback structures. They will hang on by their fingernails because they will tell themselves if we have accountability structures, it will ruin the company. How often have I heard that in Germany? If we allow for a works council, in German it's called a Betriebsrat. If we allow for a works council in this company, it will ruin the company. It'll be over. Which I always thought was so interesting because I said, but there aren't, aren't there, isn't this a normal thing in German companies? Isn't it normal to have a Betriebsrat? Isn't it essentially a sign that this company has reached adulthood because it's an accountability structure? It prevents those founders, directors, sea levels, whatever, from just doing whatever they want. Instead, it forces them to have to be accountable for decisions that they make and actually talk with someone about them and get it approved. They just don't have free reign anymore. You can look at these accountability structures as, and this essentially what's norming, you can look at it as ruining a company or team because then it's just not the way it was before. Well, no, it isn't. But guess what? Probably only the people at the very top were benefited from it being a team informing. Everybody else was uncomfortable. How many times have I talked to product managers or the lead sort of founder in a project team where they're like, yeah, everything's cool. Everyone's really happy. And then when I do an exercise that takes the temperature of the team, you discover, oh, there's only one person on this five-person team who thinks everything's fine. And it's the leader, but everybody else is unhappy. And that's always a question I ask when the leader of something says, we're good, we're fine, everyone's happy. I ask them, would everybody else say that? Or is it just you? Which usually stops them. And if they're really honest and reflective, they will say, uh, yeah, you know what? Maybe, maybe that's not completely true. If they're not reflective, they will say, No, it's absolutely true. And you know what? If that's what they think, you can just try to show them that it's something different. But the the process of norming shouldn't be painful. It should be undertaken with curiosity to say, okay, what's going on here? What makes when when people are uncomfortable in meetings, what's making them uncomfortable? Is it because not everyone has a chance to voice their opinion? Is it because mostly only one person is speaking through all of this? Is it the fact that they say they want feedback, but every time it's offered, it's kind of shot down, or there's some evasion, or people get really defensive. What's what's happening here and and how can we change it? And this happens in discussion. This happens together. And even the process of doing it really helps teams move forward. So, in the example that I gave at the beginning of the podcast, me and this other woman working together on this tiny little team, the norming was the checking in. So the storming was her saying, I'm uncomfortable with this, I'm overwhelmed, I'm really afraid of what I have to do for this part. Which then I could say, Well, that's the part that I'm excited about. So I think we're good. And then the norming was us checking in with one another, telling each other what we'd been doing, and also saying, Hey, this has come up, this is something I need. Oh, okay, how do we either do that together? How can I support you? Maybe I do that for you, whatever that looks like. But it's It's communication. Norming is communication. Norming is creating new processes. Norming is saying, all right, the way that we did it before didn't work, fine. What do we want to try? And norming is very iterative. You have to try different things. Just because you've gone through storming and someone has said, oh, I don't like this. And you've gotten to the norming stage, it doesn't mean that everything you try is going to work on the first time. But you are iterating. You are trying different things. And because you've gone through storming, people feel comfortable saying, This doesn't work for me. So this norming might be a process of putting in place a new process and then you have to storm through it again and then get to norming. Like it's really cyclical in those two. But once you're able to form some foundational processes or accountability structures, then you get to performing where a team is actually working well. They're working out of their strengths, they know their roles, they know how to give feedback to each other and speak up. They're not afraid of retribution. This is an adult company or an adult team. These are people who trust each other. They trust their leaders. The leaders trust their people and believe them. They really have these open voices that people are not afraid to speak up. And the leadership is not afraid of what their people say. And they're not afraid of accountability structures. They're not afraid of both feedback structures and they're not afraid of having something like, or specifically, a works council as part of the company to say this is an accountability structure. It's going to change how this company works, but it's not going to destroy it. If it's going to destroy it, then maybe it deserves to be destroyed because it can't survive without super toxic work environments. Okay, if that's true, then okay, then this company probably should not continue to work in the way that it is. It needs a major shakeup. And this is part of the change environment and transformation, but it's really difficult, or it can be when the people at the top don't really want to listen because they have been in protected positions for a long time and they don't want to move out of them. They're afraid of what happens when they don't have the same kind of control that they've had for the last, I don't know, 20 years. And again, like I said at the beginning, performing doesn't mean churning out product. You can be in the forming stages and churning out product. You can be highly profitable, you can have wonderful products. It doesn't mean that you are on a performing team or in a performing organization because performing is about how people work together. It's not so much about the product. Now, adjourning is this extra piece that is essentially what happens when a project is over and you are saying goodbye, and it's all about recognizing the moment, recognizing the team that you've had, and saying this is this is what we were, this is what we've had, and honoring it. This is not always possible because sometimes people are pulled out of teams for any number of reasons, and you don't really have a chance to celebrate or honor together what you've had. It can happen, I think there are many instances when it doesn't. Because what normally happens within a company, or even the company itself, either gets new leadership or you have a big shakeup in a team, you get a new member, your work changes, your goals change, whatever, then you're back informing again. And you have to go through all those steps. Hopefully, it's faster to get to storming, it's faster to get to that point because you've already done it. Maybe the new people haven't, but the ones who've been around for a while have, and they're gonna be looking for that and they're gonna be ready and waiting for that opportunity to storm. But it's it's not just a process that you go through once, it's really circular. And you can you can count on the fact that you'll have to be in these places. So, one tool that you can use if you are not sure what your team is feeling or where they're at with this, if they don't know these stages, you can do a quick, hey, this is what this looks like and lay them out so that you can create, again, this common vocabulary with each other and understand what each of the stages means and doesn't mean. Then you can ask, okay, now that you know that, which stage do you think our team is in? And just like with the question before, where the leader said, Oh yeah, everybody's happy when they weren't, you will sometimes find that the person leading the team will think that they're in performing and everybody else thinks they're informing. That is a wake-up call to realize, oh, wait a, oh, hold on a second. We're not all on the same page. But it's often because those leaders are in those insulated positions, and what they're looking at is the progress of the product, not or the or the progress toward a goal, not how does everybody feel? Do they feel like their voices are being heard? So those are the stages. And one of the reasons that I think that it's really important to for people to know them is because it becomes a little less personal when you can state that this is the stage that you're in, right? If you can say to your team members, I think we're informing that is a little less scary than saying, you know what, like there are people who just aren't being held accountable, or uh, we're all just sort of tiptoeing around ourselves. Like you can use that, but again, this common vocabulary is so helpful in being able to state clearly how things are and observing, putting ourselves in the place of the observer to say, when I'm looking at this team, I see forming. And then everybody can say, Okay, yeah, I agree with that. And then you can start saying, How do we get to storming? How do we move into the next phase? How do we create space for that to happen? And there isn't just one way, but somehow there has to be an acknowledgement of the discomfort, acknowledgement of the problems is kind of a strong word, but it could be, it could be that there's a lot of problems. But if you're a very experienced team that has done this before, you might be able to simply push your way into storming, essentially, to say, like, okay, we know that this has to change. We know that there's things, but you can't do it too, you can't do it too fast either. You can't jump into storming right away because what are people gonna complain about? I mean, or what are people gonna find uncomfortable? What are people gonna say this doesn't work? If there's no this, then there's nothing to be able to storm about or against. So rushing through the stages is not worthwhile. And there's nothing wrong with forming. It's normal, it's part of developing as a team. It's an early stage and it happens, and it will happen every time your team or your goal or your product changes. So not being allergic to the thought of forming is part of moving through the cycle. You have to let it happen. You can't just say, let's just cut out the forming and go straight to storming. So you, but how? You can't. You don't know what you're you don't know what's not working. You have to go through that forming stage and you can enjoy it. You can enjoy the newness, you can enjoy exploring, you can enjoy trying new things. Like I said, storming doesn't have to be super painful if people start listening. So you can approach both forming and storming with openness and curiosity. The problem is when you ignore it, you can ignore the signs of storming and keep yourselves informing for a very long time. But you will lose great people from your organization, and you will definitely not make the kind of money that you could be making if you had performing teams. You can still churn out product, absolutely. But people who are happy and performing well and know their roles on their teams and in their companies, those are just better workspaces. They're better work environments. And you can make changes. You can, you can shift, you can adjust. Those are mature functioning companies that pivot more easily, that meet new market standards more easily. They allow you to do your business better because there's communication, there's trust, and there's a belief in where you're going that you that you just don't have if you're stuck forever in forming. Because that gets really, really old, believe me. Your challenge for today, think about when have you, have you ever been part of a performing team? And if you were, what did that look like? How did you get there? What can you point to as that storming moment? For me, it was the conversation where my partner said, This isn't working for me. What was that storming moment for you? And how did it feel to be known, be trusted, have open communication, and be doing what you were really good at on that team? I mean, I know what you're probably gonna say. But think about put yourself back into that place. If you have never been part of a performing team, if you think, man, all of the teams I've ever worked on were in forming. They never got out of it. Then I want you to think about how might you, and actually everybody can do this, even if you had a performing team. Think about teams that were stuck in norming. I mean, think about teams that were stuck in forming. How might you have pushed storming to happen? What could have been the catalyst if it wasn't you? If it was or if or if it wasn't, what might have been the catalyst for change or for storming to begin in that company? What what might storming have looked like? Or was there a moment when storming maybe started to happen, but then it didn't. It got cut off. Maybe there was a push toward a works council type thing, accountability structures, but then they pulled back. What I'm doing with that assignment, with that with this challenge, is trying to help you become aware of when those moments might come about that change is possible or that storming could begin. In a company, this is a much more difficult question. But in a team, it's a much easier question to answer. How could I produce storming within this team? How could I get us, if we are stuck in forming, how could I get us into storming so that we can start norming and then performing? Thank you for joining me today. I hope that this has been both informational, fun, and also maybe challenging to hear. As always, big thanks to Lilia Keys for our intro and outro music.