Framework library · Leadership, teams and culture

Tuckman's stages of group development

Teams do not start out working well. Tuckman's model describes the usual sequence: members are polite and look to the leader at first, then disagree about goals and roles, then settle on ways of working, then get on with the work, and finally break up. Each stage needs something different from the leader, and conflict in the second stage is a normal step rather than a sign of failure.

LevelFoundational
TimeFifteen minutes for each member to rate; an hour to discuss the results together
Who to involveEvery member of the team, rating separately, and the team leader. A facilitator from outside the team helps if the team is in open conflict.
Also calledTuckman's team development model, Tuckman's team development, forming, storming, norming, performing, Tuckman model, stages of team development

Use it when

  • A new team has been formed, for example from two merged functions, and its leader wants to know what to expect in the first months and what to do about it.
  • A team that worked well has started arguing after a change of members, leader or goal.
  • A team seems stuck: meetings are polite, progress is slow and decisions keep being pushed upwards.
  • A project team is about to be disbanded and the handover and recognition need planning.

Avoid it when

  • The group is not a team: members work alone towards separate targets. The stages describe groups with a shared task.
  • The conflict is about who decides what. Settle decision rights with a RACI matrix first. The team will often move on by itself.
  • One person's performance is the issue. Use situational leadership or the performance management cycle for that person.
  • You need a validated measure of team effectiveness for research or comparison between teams. The statements here are for discussion, not measurement.

How to run it

  1. Name the team and the moment

    Say which team and what has happened recently: "the converged network engineering team, four months after the merger". A team's stage can change quickly after a change of members or goal.

  2. Have each member rate the statements alone

    Ask everyone, including the leader, to rate before any discussion. Enter the team's average here and note in each stage where views were furthest apart.

  3. Find the closest stage

    The stage with the highest average agreement is the closest match. Two stages close together usually means the team is moving between them.

  4. Check the evidence behind the scores

    For the closest stage, write down what you have seen in meetings, decisions and delivery. A stage the evidence does not support is a mood, not a stage.

  5. Choose what the leader does next

    Forming needs a clear purpose and roles; storming needs the disagreements brought into the open and settled; norming needs the agreed ways of working written down; performing needs the leader to step back; adjourning needs a planned handover.

  6. Rate again after any significant change

    New members, a new leader or a new goal usually send a team back a stage or two. Rate again a month after the change.

Work through it

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Mistakes to avoid

  • Treating the stages as a one-way sequence. Teams move back when members or goals change, and a merged team can be performing in one area while storming in another.
  • Suppressing storming to keep the peace. The disagreements go underground and the team stays polite and slow.
  • Assuming a long-standing team is performing. Time together says little; evidence on decisions and delivery says more.
  • Using the stages to label individuals ("she is still storming"). The model describes the group, not its members.
  • Skipping adjourning. A team that ends without a handover loses what it learned, and the next team starts again from nothing.

Where it comes from

Bruce W. Tuckman, "Developmental sequence in small groups", Psychological Bulletin 63(6), 1965, proposed forming, storming, norming and performing from a review of published research on small groups. Tuckman and Mary Ann C. Jensen added a fifth stage, adjourning, in "Stages of small-group development revisited", Group & Organization Studies 2(4), 1977. The statements in the workbench are our own. Source.

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