How to Lead A Team Through It's Growth Phases
Takeaways
Learn to lead a growing team effectively by adapting your leadership style through each development stage.
All teams move through predictable stages as they develop. In the last article, I shared how to identify each stage of team development. As the leader of a team, if you know what stage a team is in, you can lead that team effectively as each stage requires a different style of leadership.
Most leaders tend to have one style of leadership that feels most comfortable to them and they use that style predominantly. When it comes to leading a team, we have to be able to shift between styles of leadership, just like you shift between gears in a vehicle depending on the conditions. This is what servant leadership involves. Servant leadership is not a style of leadership, it is a transmission of leadership gears that servant-hearted leaders shift between to offer the people around them the leadership that they need at that time, not the leader simply offering the one style of leadership that they are most comfortable operating in.
Being willing to shift out of our preferred gears as leaders and provide to those around us the leadership that helps propel them forward is the basis of what healthy, “other-minded”, but mission-focused leadership is all about. Jim Collins has written much about the level 5 leader who is that rare mix of drive and humility. I think watching if leaders can serve the needs of their team, above their own preferences, is one of the most practical ways that we can see that type of leadership play out.
FORMING – When a team is navigating this first stage, the leader must be very directive. If “clarity is kindness” then there is no place that is truer than while a team is forming. The team doesn’t know what to do at this stage, so they need an engaged leader who offers strong direction. Even if the team has been together for a while, if some significant change has been introduced, like the addition of a couple of new team members, it would not be unusual for long-time team players to feel confused about where they fit or how their role has changed.
If you are a dictator, you love this stage. If you are a relational leader, a bit aloof, or pride yourself on “not getting into the weeds”, your team is struggling in this stage. In fact, you may be leading a team that has never left this stage. But there is hope! If you channel your inner dictator at this stage, you will flourish when you get your team to stage four because you will be able to lead in the gear you feel most comfortable in.
During forming, the leader may need to take much more control and be far more directive than they would like, but remember that it is just a phase and you will need to start shifting as the team enters that second stage.
STORMING- When the bottom falls out in stage two and there is tension, angst, or friction, that is the sign of the team engine telling you to shift your leadership transmission to the next gear. They no longer need a dictator, they need a guide, a navigator, someone to help them see their way through the crises.
Imagine yourself as a guide with a team of climbers roped together on the side of a mountain as the storm rolls in. As the team starts to express concerns and frustrations, the guide can’t mirror their emotions. The guide has to maintain peace in the storm, a calmness that comes after years of weathering similar mountain storms, and a deep knowing that better weather is just on the other side of these clouds.
The demeanor of the leader is the key to stage two. The leader who calmly keeps the team moving forward, confidently navigating them through the crisis, will win the day. It is a great technique to reassure the team that what they are feeling is normal and that they will be fine if they will keep climbing through this. I even show teams the team development chart and help them identify that we are in stage two and that the tensions they are feeling are normal.
NORMING – As a team moves through the stages, each team member asks the question “Will this leader let me lead?” The third stage is where you will significantly shift leadership gears to help the team make more decisions, solve more of the problems, and take on significantly greater authority.
Some leaders begin to shift to a “management by objective” model instead of managing tasks. Leaders who lean toward micro-management will feel pushback at this stage. Instead of managing each project or task, try to focus more of your energy on defining big objectives and let the team decide on the 20 tasks to achieve the target you selected. Leadership at this stage is more focused on setting a clear vision and then creating systems that measure results and returns or assess impact and outcomes.
If you are a strong leader you may have to lose a public battle so that people will not always defer to you. A good friend and mentor of mine, intentionally lost a long-standing debate in front of the whole staff to someone on his team, not because he agreed with what she was advocating but because the team needed to see that he would empower others to make decisions if they had done their homework. I’ll never forget his advice when he shared what he did. “If you are a solid leader, some decisions are cheap. Building leaders and the team is more important than tactical decisions. Your priority is to build the team, not to control every decision.” Well said.
There is an old saying, “You can have control or growth but you can’t have both”. While that statement is not true in stage one (in that stage, you can’t achieve growth without taking control), it is the battle cry for anyone leading a stage three team. At this stage, surrender control to achieve growth.
PERFORMING – You will hear leaders who have helped their team achieve stage four saying things like, “What do you need?” “You know more than I do.” Stage four leaders are laser-focused on lowering the hurdles that lie ahead of their team to make sure that their performing season can be extended as long as possible.
It is not uncommon for teams to start to function with the leader as a sort of champion, cheerleader, and consultant as they own decisions, take full accountability but operate with high levels of freedom and responsibility for the work at hand.
Driven personalities often do well in stages one and two because they thrive with the team focused on their leadership, but usually struggle in stages three and four because they want to be too involved for the team's good. For some, it is just too hard to humble themselves and serve the team around them.
Relational leaders struggle in stages one and two but often thrive in the later stages if they can manage to get the team there.
Remember that there is still plenty of tension in stage four. It is just that teams have gotten better at dealing with the tension than they did in earlier stages. Great teams find ways to permit themselves to deal with conflict poorly without shame, in the interest of getting good at it so they can deal with it better in later stages.
Similarly, if a team has reached stage four, but winds up moving down a few stages because of a change that is introduced, given the right leadership, they will often move back up through the stages much quicker the next time.
Any team in a stage of high performance that adds one new teammate will back up at least to norming. If two or more teammates are added, most teams will go back to forming and need to go through each stage again. Don’t try to skip the stages. Welcome them as the natural path to performance.
As you consider this framework keep in mind that the vast majority of people don’t know how to work on a team. Most people have never actually been on a real team like we are describing here. They have been in a group that was called a team. They will need a leader who understands team formation and can help them create a genuine team.
In Western cultures, particularly in the US, most grew up with a high value on rugged individualism. Collaboration was seen as a weakness. Eastern cultures often value collaboration so much that “group think” becomes a very real challenge and people won’t speak up and share ideas that go against what the team is thinking. In diverse, multicultural teams, the leader needs to be sensitive to these clear differences and nudge each team member towards the healthy middle of neither “group think” nor rugged individualism.
There is also a lot of diversity when it comes to age. Younger people are often taught to collaborate while older team members may feel less comfortable with group play. When I was growing up, our school desks were in rows carefully placed so we could not “collaborate”. We had a word for collaboration. We called it “cheating.” But now, desks are in pods, and homework and projects are done in groups. Don’t be surprised as you are leading a team, that younger members will want to solve problems in a group around a whiteboard while older teammates will want to go back to their office to come up with ideas before having to discuss it with the group. Setting clear expectations as a team around what feels comfortable to everyone up front is important to avoid misunderstandings.
It is a privilege to lead a team but it also comes with responsibility. Knowing what your team needs from you at each stage, combined with the humility to offer them what they need at that stage, and a drive to keep changing gears yourself to stay ahead of the team will land you with a top-performing team. If you’d like me to join you as you develop your team, we can work together on a training, team assessment, or some coaching. If you ever feel stuck, I’m just a phone call away.
