The Benefits of Stable, Long-Standing Teams

If you want a great team, you should keep the team together for a long time. Studies show that long standing teams make fewer mistakes and perform better.

Dynamic Teams or Long-Standing Teams?

If your goal was to create a high performing team, how would you go about it? Would you keep changing the team members or would you keep the team members stable?

Most organizations take the former approach. They spin up new teams whenever they have a new project or initiative. Or they shuffle people around from one team to another without much consideration for the impact on team performance.

Or they assign the same person to multiple teams. They don’t treat teams as more than the sum of their parts. And they underestimate the time it takes to build a high-performing team.

Stages of Team Development

Consider Dr. Bruce Tuckman’s stages of Group Development, which define a set of stages that groups of individuals must go through to become a team that delivers results.

Most people know these as forming, storming, norming, and performing. If a team is performing and we add or remove team…