Embracing Team Evolution

SUMMARY

Do you find that the team you're working in is not the same one you joined? Are you confused by the changes that keep going on and the relationships that grow or don't grow?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence speaker and trainer of the year, and master coach trainer. Today I want to continue our conversation around teamwork and collaboration by helping you to embrace team evolution.

This week, I will unpack with you the evolution stages of a team, then see how you can use that to increase teamwork and collaboration at your workplace.

Number one is forming.
Number two is storming.
Number three is norming.
Number four is performing.
Number five is reforming. 

There you have it: The five stages of evolution of a team.

This framework allows you to evaluate what stage your team is in right now and why. By looking at this, you can see if what you are going through is a good thing or whether there are things that you might want to change or shift to go to that next stage.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around teamwork and collaboration by unpacking the four pillars of teamwork.
I'll see you then.

TRANSCRIPT

Do you find that the team you're working in is not the same one you joined? Are you confused by the changes that keep going on and the relationships that grow or don't grow?

Well, stick with me because, in this week's episode, I will help you understand why and how to change things.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence speaker and trainer of the year, and master coach trainer. Today I want to continue our conversation around teamwork and collaboration by helping you to embrace team evolution.

Last week, we started this conversation around teamwork and collaboration — one of the most important competencies in the relationship management quadrant of Social and Emotional Intelligence.

You looked at the fact that teams are made up of individuals, and those individuals coming together bring their strengths and uncertainties, which can either create some challenges or help a team get the outcome that it was put together for.

I talked to you about establishing charters and creating a sticky team, and you understood that teams evolve.

What I want to do this week is help you understand the evolution of a team so you can have a look as to where your team is and anticipate some things that might be coming ahead or make some changes so you can actually have a team that you want to be in and that works together to get the result that you want.

The world is constantly changing. Therefore, it is inevitable that everything within it changes as well. And your team is no different.

I remember being in many teams over the years where the team was put together for a particular reason. Then, suddenly, everything seemed to go off the rails, and it wasn't giving me the certainty that I had when I started on that team.

When you put the collective uncertainties of individual team members together, you create problems, stagnate the team, and can even take it off the rails.

Therefore, you need to embrace that, just like conflict, team evolution is inevitable. It's not a “good or bad or right or wrong” thing, but what it does is it gives the team a different purpose and brings the team into a different stage. By embracing this fact instead of fighting against it, you can remain an effective team member that produces the results you want.

To help you understand this, I'm going to unpack Tuckman's model back in 1965 and put some nuances on that in my experience.

However, I don't believe in reinventing the wheel. So, this is a great model to give you some context and a framework to look at, and a lens for you to investigate where your team is.

So, let's look at the evolution stages of a team, then see how you can use that to increase teamwork and collaboration at your workplace.

Number one is forming.

For a team to exist, it has to form.

The forming stage is where individuals are plucked from different places and are put together to form a collective. This is a scary time for many people, and it's a crucial time in respect of the success of that team moving forward.

This is the stage where your team comes together — they will meet each other, and people experience those first impressions. They make up ideas around each team member based on their lens with which they navigate the earth.

Team members will start to find out each other’s strengths and opinions. Some are still wary — they hold back and do not give their whole self to the team yet because they are unsure who to trust.

This is the early evolutionary stage of a team — it’s just getting started. To expect that a team at this stage would be producing high-level results is very naive. The goal of a forming team is to first create a team that can work together.

In this early stage of evolution, it’s an excellent opportunity to bring in things like a team charter to work out (as we talked about last week) what's important to the individuals in that team and, therefore, have a structure that gives your team an idea on how you can work together.

The forming stage is also an excellent opportunity to build individual relationships. Last week, I said (controversially) that there are ‘I-s” in TEAM. Because a team is not a thing on its own but a formation of individuals coming together.

So, one of the greatest things you can do as you form a team is to give space and an environment for the team to get to know each other deeper and not on a superficial or task-oriented level. This is so your team can understand each other and emphatise with one another, and therefore, collaboratively work with each other in the early stages.

So, forming is the first stage of team evolution.

Number two is storming.

Every team that's going to ever do anything will inevitably go through this stage.

So, you have started to form a team, but in doing that, you realise that everybody’s got their view on things — they've got their own opinions, strengths, areas of development, and blindspots. Hence, it's inevitable that there will be some early conflicts. There will be butting of heads, territorial claims, and behaviour from the internal uncertainties that people face individually.

Being able to stamp your authority and make sure that you and others like you belong are the basis of human behaviour coming to this storming phase.

The storming phase is also when the team brainstorms — where they come together through the challenges they have experienced and work out a plan as to how the team will move forward and produce the results that it wants.

When you look at this stage differently, you can see that a little conflict and differing ideas and opinions are valuable. Because if only one person — you — had to make all the decisions, and do everything the team was put together to do, then there's no use putting together a team.

So, the storming phase allows you to work out the rough edges in your team so you can all move forward and achieve your team’s goals.

Having that team charter that I talked to you about last week enables this stage to be healthy. This is because you’ve got a document that you can go back to and go:

“Hey, is this behavior that we're experiencing in this team what we agreed that we were going to do?”

Instead of talking to an individual, you’re talking to a document. So, it's taking that personality out of it. It's removing that sense of wrong, that “someone said something about me."

Now, the maturity of the members will directly determine whether the team ever moves out of this stage. I have worked with many teams, and sometimes those teams had been in this storming stage for a very long time because they did not work out their differences — people's agendas were self-centered, they were not collective, were not working as a team, and there was no trust and unity. People were just fighting, and the conflict was not resolved.

While this stage in a team’s evolution can be very challenging, this is the most critical time for the team to come together, work out its differences, and get ready for what's ahead.

So that's the second stage of evolution: storming.

Number three is norming.

This is a stage where eventually — if they get through the storming stage — things tend to just level out. People have worked out their differences (or most of them anyway), and they start working together.

You adjust to the individual behaviours of each other and work out a way to work together.

Team members often get into this stage and navigate it by having the rules and values they agreed on before them.

However, one of the challenges at this stage is that creativity can be lost

Hence, it's now something that's happening: most of what you do becomes “a matter of fact," and most of your team members know their roles. There may be occasional conflict, but you are all just getting on with what you're supposed to be doing. Although this may seem beneficial to the team as there’s not much conflict, this can also create stagnation.

So, in this norming stage, you need to recognise that a different idea —a little tweak and adjustment — now and then is actually healthy for the team. This stage becomes unhealthy when you and your team have come to a point where you just agree to disagree and move forward so you can get your job done. Doing so creates an individual mentality.

So you went through the forming stage, you got into the storming stage where everything seemed exciting — you got into some conflict and moved forward from that. However, when you go into this norming stage, you need to be careful that you are not just turning up.

So, that’s the third stage: Norming.

Number four is performing.

Sadly, not all teams reach this stage.

Performing is a stage where your team has a high level of trust and performance. You are moving forward and achieving results every day.

This is when you and your team have found ways of moving through conflict and smoothing things over. You let go of past hurts, agree to move forward, and look at the team and the team's goal with a mindset of unity.

There are no silos; your people are working together; not just focused on their stuff but also have a mindset of helping each other out. And the team actually performs the task they were actually put together for.

This is the stage where your team goes from being independent to interdependent:

They have this all-for-one and one-for-all mindset, and the strengths and areas for development of every individual come together in a cohesive and sticky team.

Team members are more competent in their roles, and conflict is actually expected — not something to be feared — because there's a structure and a system within your team to move through it quickly, learn from it, and take those lessons into a more cohesive and collaborative team moving forward.

Becoming a performing team is the goal of every team that's formed. But as I said, sadly, not all teams will reach this stage.

Perhaps you're in a team now which is still stuck in the storming or norming stage, and you really want it to become a performing team.

A performing team is not just good for the team but is great for every individual within the team.

So a performing team is a well-oiled team where no one gets left behind. Each team member has their differences, but they know how to use those differences for the greater good.

So the fourth stage is performing.

Number five is reforming.

Particularly, in today's fast-paced, ever-changing world, a team that started for a particular purpose may need to reform. And in the process of reforming, it sometimes can be disbanded — It might adjourn, be put aside, and individuals from that team could be taken and put in other teams.

This is something that creates a lot of uncertainty and a lot of upheaval in organisations because people go:

“I have an identity in a team. I now have to find a new identity."

Therefore, the behavior that comes out might be one of anxiety and uncertainty because they have to go through that forming and storming stage again. There can also be a change in relationships. And sometimes those relationships are lost because it was only that team that brought those people together.

So the first thing you need to do is look at a reforming team in a more positive light. Our mindset needs to see reforming as an opportunity and not a challenge.

Because one of the things people do is they look for blame. They go:

“Whose fault is it that this team is not staying together?”

The reforming of a team can happen as simply as one person leaving that team. Most of the time, someone else is brought into the team to take that person’s place. So now you have a situation where you’ve got a team with an outsider coming in and an outsider going into an unfamiliar team.

What happens now is that the team needs to reform. It needs to go back to the basis of team evolution of the forming stage.

So, reforming is all about taking what was formed and renovating and changing that. And that's going to happen when new people come in.

Another reason why teams reform is the focus of the team and the actual task the team is put together for. Shifting tides in what an organisation is doing means that the teams you had may no longer meet the organization's objectives as a whole. So now, the role of that team could shift. Therefore, more uncertainties can come in there.

So, the fifth stage is reforming.

There you have it: The five stages of evolution of a team.

What I want you to really focus on here is that evolution is a good thing. You start in the forming stage and evolve to become the team you need to become.

As individuals, you are different when you get on the team until you hit that performing stage.

You need to understand that although I've presented a linear timeline of team evolution, it doesn't always go that way. Sometimes, teams are in storming from day one. So, there’s no formation in the team — it all just started with conflict.

There can also be a time when your team is just about to get to the performing stage, then something happens and changes that will require your team to reform.

Other times, you just go in and out of the different stages of evolution.

So, there is no linear and perfect way of forming a team.

This framework allows you to evaluate what stage your team is in right now and why. By looking at this, you can see if what you are going through is a good thing or whether there are things that you might want to change or shift to go to that next stage.

So, what do you need to do?

Have you gone to the norming stage where you just turn up every day and greet each at the water bubbler, but you’re not really performing as a team?

What I challenge you to do is talk to the people that are in your team. Share this information with them and look at where you are and where you want to go next.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around teamwork and collaboration by unpacking the four pillars of teamwork.

I'll see you then.