Teamwork not 'smooth sailing'

For people looking to make a career move or just wanting a change in job scenery, there isn’t a better time than now; there are more jobs being created than there are people available to fill them. With all this movement of people in the job market, it means that there are new teams being formed in organisations all over the country.

When a new team is formed, team members need to get to know each other – their skills, values, opinions, preferences – team dynamics are established and a team culture begins to develop.

It is not always, or even usually, smooth sailing. While initially everyone is trying to present their best self, make a good impression and avoid conflict, this is unsustainable in the messy world of work. Competing priorities, deadline pressure, and unexpressed needs, among other factors, can lead to things getting a bit crunchy.

In the 1960s, Psychologist Bruce Tuckman came up with the memorable phrase "forming, storming, norming, and performing” to describe the path that teams follow on their way to high performance. It is a model that is still relevant today.

Forming

In this phase, people are establishing relationships and working out what their tasks are and how they relate to other roles and to the team’s purpose. They may be anxious, curious, or excited and eager to get started. During this phase, people are looking to their leader for direction and to build team cohesion.

It is a difficult climate for team-forming at the moment. The disruption brought on by the pandemic, and the increase in people working remotely means there isn’t the consistency in interaction and relative stability that we were used to prior to Covid. Taking time to consciously build whanaungatanga (relationships with a sense of connection and belonging) is well worth the effort. When a team first comes together, encourage people to talk about their lives, whānau, and hobbies. It is also worthwhile getting members to discuss:

What attracted you to this job?

What are your aspirations for the role?

What makes for a good day at work?

What do you need from the rest of us?

It can be helpful to use a psychometric tool such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, or DiSC to better understand people’s natural personality preferences and how this impacts their work.

The term “team bonding” gets a bit of a hard time these days but it is through shared experiences that we build whanaungatanga and trust. After all, when things are bonded, they don’t come unstuck very easily! The best team bonding experiences are those which are challenging but enjoyable, and allow members to show different parts of themselves than they would normally do at work.

Getting your team to engage in the type of activities described above can help you build a strong foundation for the storming stage.

Storming

Rather than presenting their best selves all the time, team members start to show their whole selves. People’s different styles of working surface and may clash with each other. For example, those who prefer a planned approach to projects will become frustrated by those who meet deadlines with a last-minute flurry of activity. Team members who prefer quiet might become annoyed by those who like to banter while they work. During the storming stage, people start pushing against established boundaries and may challenge the leader’s authority. Conflict occurs as competing priorities and differences in approach or opinion are exposed.

Rather than leaving thorny issues and hope they will sort themselves out, it is worthwhile to come together and talk through them in a constructive way. Sometimes having an external facilitator can make this more successful. They should provide you with a framework that will make the conversation less daunting.

A good starting point is to revisit your common purpose by asking, “What are we all here for?” “Why is this important to us?” This korero helps to unify the team by reminding them that they are all in the same waka, they just have different roles to play. It is also worth discussing what you need from each other again as this will probably have evolved since the Forming stage.

Sometimes teams become stuck in the Storming stage. This is not good for people’s wellbeing due to the unresolved and often ongoing conflict. Although this stage can be uncomfortable for everybody, understanding that it is a normal part of team development can help people form a constructive mindset to working through it. Courage, communication and emotional intelligence are crucial to surviving the Storming stage.

Norming

Having steered the team waka through the rough waters of the Storming stage, team members’ trust in each other has grown and they are now more comfortable asking for help and accepting constructive feedback. A healthy conflict of ideas can take place leading to better outcomes. Team members are more relaxed around each other and have developed respect for their leader. As a leader, you want to maintain the team’s motivation by ensuring tasks are challenging, people can work with minimal oversight and successes are celebrated.

Performing

Teams with high levels of motivation and effective leadership eventually reach the Performing stage. If you have ever worked in a highly-performing team you will know the “buzz” – that positive energy – that people experience when working together. This optimal stage is characterised by collaboration, interdependency and efficiency. People work with a high degree of autonomy and the team becomes self-managing. Often close friendships are formed and team members really have each other’s backs.

It is not a straightforward path getting from Forming to Performing, but highly rewarding for those teams that do. A decade after he presented his initial model, Tuckman added a fifth stage, Adjourning/Mourning, to describe the disbanding of a team and the sense of loss but also hopefully closure, that goes with it. Of course, in the current job market, with so much movement between roles, there are just as many teams Adjourning as Forming. Understanding these natural progressions in team development can allow leaders and team members alike to navigate them with more confidence and success.

This article originally featured in Sarah's "Connections" column in The Otago Daily Times on 25 April 2022