Understanding the Life Cycle of a Team
Takeaways
Discover the stages of team development: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. Learn to identify and lead through each phase, enhancing team dynamics and achieving peak performance.
Ever feel like you are struggling to understand what is happening to your team? One day it seems fine and the next, morale seems to have bottomed out, productivity is lagging and everyone is looking at you for a solution. All teams go through a natural life cycle and when you know how to identify where your team is at, you then have the tools to know exactly how to lead them forward. Having this model in my head as I worked with various teams over the years has been a game-changer because I could be confident that I understood exactly where my team was at, what was coming next, and what I needed to provide as a leader.
There are so many definitions of a team, so let’s start by coming up with a definition for this discussion. I think of a team as a small group with specific roles, holding itself mutually accountable to achieve a goal. Let’s break each of these components down to make sure we are thinking the same thing about what a team is.
Small group - When teams become too large they become dysfunctional. The optimum size for a team is three to nine people. A football team may have 60 players, so it is not a team, but a team of teams. It would be impossible for a coach to draw the best out of 60 players, so a football team is broken into the offensive team, defensive team, and special teams. If you have more than seven on your team, you need to start planning when you will restructure to a team of teams. It is a great opportunity to elevate a rising leader eager to manage others and form a team around them.
Specific roles - If the team you are leading is going to be great, you need to help people figure out what they are great at, and design their role around focusing on that. It is more than taking everyone in your organization and dividing them up into groups and sticking the label “team” on them. You need specific people in specific roles that they can excel in.
Mutually accountable - We know how to be accountable to a boss and our mom but all great teams hold themselves accountable. If a team loses and the coach calls a team meeting and challenges the team there will be a 10% greater chance of winning the next game. But if the players call the meeting and challenge each other they have a 55% better chance of winning. Great teams have peer pressure, not boss pressure. No one likes to disappoint their boss, but if we are holding back our whole team from succeeding, that can be a healthy motivator to shore up any performance gaps as soon as possible.
Goal – There are two key things about team goals. First, the goal has to be external or it will create dysfunction. External means that the goal can’t be a goal about the team itself. If the focus of the team is always on restructuring the team or creating better systems within the organization, eventually the lack of meaningful contribution to the world around you will sink team morale. There is nothing wrong with doing things to make the team better, but you have to have a goal that is larger and more motivating than that. Second, the goal has to be the same for everyone. If everyone on the team is not contributing to the same goal you will create division. There may be lots of different tasks, but those tasks should all roll up to achieve the same goal. This is where a good strategic planning model really can help drive team productivity and cohesion.
Now that we are all on the same page as to what we mean when we say the word team, let’s talk about the life cycles of teams. Every team is in a certain place in its development at any given time and there are markers of each stage to help you identify as the leader of which stage your team is in at the moment. When you can identify which stage a team is in, it helps you provide the leadership your team needs to help them navigate that stage well and move on to the next one.
In my next post, I will share how to guide your team in each stage but in this post, we will focus on how to identify what stage your team is in.
Some call these stages Orientation, Transition, Action, and Production. Others prefer Participating, Potential, Performing, and Producing. My preference is Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. They are all the same concepts, just different authors and books based on the same research and observations.
One quick note before we dive into the stages. It is important to not see these as linear steps but more of a circular process. Each team is at a particular stage all the time but teams are never static. They are moving from one stage to the next and once your team achieves a certain stage of development, various circumstances could send it back to a previous stage.
FORMING While this is the first stage that a team works through it is not just for when a team starts up. Any significant change or combination of changes on a team will throw the group back into the forming stage. This is why leaders who are addicted to change and regularly indulge themselves with that desire for change, rarely lead teams that spend much time in the later stages.
A new product launch, new programming, a new team leader, or multiple new staff at the same time will send a team back into the forming stage. The signs that a team is forming are that morale and expectations are high and while the team is functioning fine, it has not created any great synergy where impact is better together than working apart.
Most leaders describe this as the honeymoon. The excitement of the new change is still real, and nothing or little has gone wrong yet. While new leaders are starry-eyed thinking it will always be like this, experienced leaders are waiting for the other shoe to drop. When there is a testing, usually of the leader of the team, the group is catapulted into the next stage.
STORMING This second stage is full of angst and tension as the team will start to feel like there is not much progress. People may carefully start to question why it doesn’t seem to be any better than before we launched, or before we introduced these new teammates, programs, or products. The most recent change that pulled the team back to forming will come under fire and usually the leader as well.
It is quite normal to have a bit of sarcastic humor here, especially toward the leader. As the leader you are best served to not get defensive, but see it for what it is, the team trying to make sense of where they are at. Some team members will start to jockey for positions as they try to figure out where they fit now that there is a new normal for the team. Emotions will go from extreme to extreme and this will take two to three months typically.
This stage doesn’t get intense every time but, normally, it will. What is happening is that a change was introduced and while everyone was supportive at first, as the new concept runs into its first challenges, the productivity or impact of the team starts to drag as they figure out how to function well with this new team member, leader, product or program. This is completely normal and if the leader can maintain their composure and confidence, the team will find its way into the third stage.
NORMING You were a group in stages one and two. You don’t truly become a team, according to our definition above until stage three. As the team emerges from the fog of stage two and productivity and impact start to catch up with the work in the first two stages, they begin to see the reality and people start to say “This is going to be better than I thought.”
You will notice teammates giving helpful feedback one-on-one and it will generate progress instead of friction. People will begin to express genuine appreciation to each other, and will start speaking in terms of “we” instead of “I” or “they”. One of the great signs of norming is that team members will start to relate peer to peer instead of just peer to leader.
Two main pitfalls keep teams stuck in stage three. The first is the leader allowing themselves to get pulled into the weeds and solving the problems that should be solved within the team. If you are the leader, you will need to create clear boundaries at this stage to keep decisions that should be made by someone else and problems that should be solved by someone else from being handed to you. Just like the pilot of a plane can’t be concerned with the drink order for the passenger in seat 11B, you need to be focused on the roles that only the leader can do.
The second pitfall that locks teams into norming is when someone on the team won’t deal with the problem they have with another member of the team one-on-one. As long as one team member won’t go directly to the person they need to have a challenging conversation with, and instead, brings those concerns to others on the team, you will be stuck in stage three. Watch closely for team members that tend to side-bar with someone, about teammates. Left unaddressed, this dysfunction will pull the team back into the tension of stage two.
PERFORMING – While reaching the performing stage is what we are all shooting for as leaders, it is never a case of arriving as it takes work to keep a team in that stage. It feels like flying a kite, once it is up in the air, the work begins of constantly staying vigilant, as you are endlessly adjusting and tweaking to keep flying optimally.
While the beauty of this stage is the team is almost completely focused on working peer to peer and holding each other mutually accountable. As the leader you are watching for systems to fail as the team is now functioning well beyond the systems that may have been formed in stage one. As people were figuring out their roles in stage one, processes were probably rigid and defined but those structures may be too confining now as people start to perform at a higher level and want to be free and creative.
You know you are in the performing stage, when teammates look forward to the team meetings, even though most communication is happening informally outside of the meetings. The team may even start to create team shirts, have more celebrations or call team meetings before you do as the leader. These are all healthy signs and as the leader, your focus will now pivot to facilitating and preserving the healthy team culture that has formed as well as looking around corners for any roadblocks ahead.
As you think about the team that you are on or the team that you lead, can you identify what stage they are in? Think about where they are in terms of morale in relation to impact or productivity. That is often a great clue.
Remember that this is not linear. Just because a team is in the middle of a season of norming, performing might not be their next stage. They could grow by adding a couple of team members and they will jump back into forming and will likely spend a bit of time in storming before finding their way back into norming. A team is never static, it is either moving towards the next stage up or towards the next stage down.
