Understanding a Team’s Natural Development Process: The Tuckman Team Development Model

A working model that makes navigating team leadership a little less daunting.

Have you heard of the Tuckman Team Development Model? It’s been around for decades, and in our work training leaders, we’ve found it’s the model of group development folks are most likely to have come across before. The model’s longevity is at least partly due to the easy-to-remember mnemonic device built into the stage names. More importantly, it provides a simple but effective mental model to help leaders and team members understand the journey a group will tend to go through as it seeks to accomplish its purpose over time.

Breaking Down the Five Stages

Bruce Tuckman published his research on group development in 1965. In his original model, he identified four stages that working groups move through as they organize around a shared task: forming, storming, norming, and performing. A few years later, Tuckman published additional research that posited a fifth stage in the group life cycle that acknowledged the normalcy of endings — adjourning.

The stages are characterized as follows:

Forming: Team members are in a process of orienting themselves to the shared task. Most discussion will focus on the “IT” of the task (scope, strategy, etc). During this stage, leaders can help by establishing some basic structural boundaries (team mission and vision, ground rules, and the beginnings of roles and responsibilities). Typically folks will be on their best behavior as they feel out the group and find their place. They may engage (consciously or not) in status management to stay safe and find approval from the group. In order to move beyond this stage, group members must be willing to move beyond their comfort zone and risk some conflict as they lean into becoming a higher-performing team.

Storming: In this phase, team members have the opportunity to establish trust by moving through conflict. Disagreements may emerge over the best way to approach the work or as personalities and styles clash. While it’s possible for a group to spin out of control in the storming phase in the absence of capable leadership, it’s important not to try to circumvent the important process taking place in this stage. In other words, the way around storming is actually to move through it. Storming presents an opportunity to clarify purpose and strengthen relationships by moving through conflict with directness and candor. During this stage, a leader can help by emphasizing the importance of good communication, including establishing robust approaches to conflict resolution, giving and receiving feedback, and balancing advocacy and inquiry.

Norming: We might think of the norming phase as the treasure that awaits in the dark cave of storming. If a team is able to move through the storming phase, it typically emerges with hard-won trust, clearer individual roles, greater clarity around what is most important and most needed to achieve its goals, and momentum to get there. There’s a greater sense of shared identity (WE), and the group is poised to really ramp up. Often this is where we see creativity and productivity increase.

Performing: Think of this stage as the time when team members reach more of an unconsciously competent phase. It’s a shared flow state. Members are more knowledgeable and competent and are able to perform more efficiently and effectively. Decisions can be made quicker and teams are able to move nimbly and react quicker to a changing landscape.

Adjourning: No team lasts forever in a steady state. Markets and customer needs change, organizations shift strategy. Adjourning represents the ending phase of a team’s life cycle. When the time comes for a group to end, even if the ending is a happy one (e.g. we just sold the company for a great exit) it’s typical to see signs of grief and loss. Navigating endings well can be one of the most challenging tasks for a leader.

How Does This Model Help To Understand Your Team?

The Tuckman model is great for leaders because it provides a generally useful map of the team development process. Having the map in hand can help us understand and normalize the experiences we’re having as well as inform decisions about what our teams may need as they organize around a shared goal.

Here are a few key insights the Tuckman model can help us remember:

1. Team development is dynamic and cyclical rather than static or linear. A team is always in some kind of process, and we can affect that process by tending to the conditions surrounding the team. Gardening is a helpful metaphor to illustrate how tending to the team dynamic involves regular interventions to keep the system thriving.
2. It’s normal for a team’s effectiveness (productivity, efficiency, sense of mutual trust) to dip during the storming phase (see graphic) before trending upward in the norming and performing stages. Storming is a normal part of group development and should be seen as an opportunity to establish norms and grow trust as opposed to a signal that something is necessarily broken in the team dynamic.
3. Changes to a team (team member changes/turnover, a new project/strategy, etc.) will often cause a team to cycle back through earlier stages. This is normal and to be expected.
4. Positive movement through the phases can be supported in a number of ways:

• Using tools like the Operators Manual to help team members get to know each other and form more explicit, conscious relationships.
• Co-creating explicit team norms to guide collective behavior, especially related to things like: How we deal with conflict. How we give and receive feedback. How we make decisions. How we approach accountability.
• Recognizing conflict as an opportunity to clarify direction and establish deeper trust among team members.
• Provide clarity of direction. Brené Brown says it best: “Clarity is kindness.” Teams need to know what their big goal is and why it matters so they can engage in a shared discovery of how to get there.

5. Endings are a normal part of organizational life, and rituals can help teams move through endings with less thrash and collateral damage.

The Map is Not the Territory

You may be familiar with the old adage, “The map is not the terrain.” Wilderness guides like our colleague, Jim Marsden, often add an additional note: “…and when in doubt, go with the terrain.” Models like Tuckman’s, much like maps of wild places, are helpful insofar as they represent the reality of the terrain.

We believe Tuckman’s model provides an accurate representation of the predictable patterns working groups will move through. That said, each group context is unique, and organizational conditions often change quickly and unexpectedly. It’s important for leaders and team members to pay attention to what’s happening in the group dynamic. Stay engaged and curious, ask questions, reflect back the dynamics you’re seeing to the group, and provide the structures that support the team for the phase they are in. You might even consider sharing the Tuckman model with your team and asking them where on the development curve they think they are.

Leading teams can certainly feel confusing and overwhelming at times, but having a decent map in hand can be grounding and settling when we’re feeling lost. Hopefully, the Tuckman model can provide you with a working model that makes navigating team leadership a little less daunting!