The four stages in the growth of a team.

From the time our earliest ancestors first tried to organize to get a job done it's been obvious that this is not easy. It's obvious that you will have to bring people together in a group if you're going to get a project of any size or complexity finished. However teams are comprised of people. And that's a problem, because people don't always work well together at first. So people study team building because often a lot of money and prestige has been invested on the understanding the team will quickly function at its best.

For the last 40 years one description of team development has been accepted in the West. It was first described in a almost incidental study of 50 academic papers published by Bruce Tuckman in 1965. In what was to become a seminal paper he described four stages of a team's life: forming, storming, norming and performing.

Researchers through the West agree that a team will change if it is together for some time. Indeed it's almost common-sense that when people first group together they will want to know about the other members, will have to change to one degree or another and accommodate other members, could experience conflicts that need to be settled, but eventually may become a harmonious, productive unit achieving more together than each could have achieved alone.

Forming is the first of Tuckman's stages

In Stage One the members try to find out what the other people are like, and find out what is expected of them as people and group members, by testing the boundaries. This is not a time for innovation, and members generally just do what the team has always done and get help from other members.

Then the Storming begins.

It's a natural thing, of course, to resist being pushed around by a group you're part of. And Tuckman's label is excellent.

In the end peace has it chance, however, as the group develops further and enters what Tuckman called the Norming phase.

The people begin to tell each other what they personally think, they become a group, and a new team norm develops and is agreed to.

When this happens the team enters the final stage in Tuckman's original list: he called it Performing.

It's a dream time for the team's managers. Team members understand each other and working together is easy. People co-operate to get jobs done, to the extent of doing other people's jobs where that's beneficial. The team leader will be unchallenged and members support each other.

Now, Tuckman didn't stop there. He developed his four stages. He added another and of course there were always going to be researchers who debated and refined his paper. But in spite of this, Tuckman's clear outline of the research of his day, and his appealing labels, have stayed around and till now are used as the foundation of understanding how groups function.