Helping a “Storming” Team
Leveraging the Six Domains of Leadership and the Tuckman Model
Introduction
All teams go through transitions. When people first get together into teams, it’s more a meet-and-greet than an actual team. Lots of individuals getting together to hopefully achieve something. Slowly, teams move through various stages until they start performing. There are specific stages teams go through and leaders play a key role in these transitions.
The Tuckman Stages of Group Development, developed by Bruce Tuckman, is a well-known model for the stages teams go through. In case you are not familiar, here’s a graphic that shows the stages:
The model does a good job of describing the stages that a group goes through, with a caveat: groups can regress in particular if new players are inserted or goals change. We will not discuss this regression here.
How can a leader help a team transition? Maybe with a little help from the leader they’ll transition faster to the “Performing” stage? Another model, the Six Domains of Leadership (SDL), can help the leader determine what s/he can do to accelerate this transition. In particular, in this article, I’ll address how SDL can help the leader transition the team out of “Storming” and into “Norming”.
