How to empower your team at every stage of development

Remote MeetingsTransform remote meetings into productive work sessions through collaborative agendas and time-saving templates. Chiefs of StaffTrack key takeaways from executive meetings, enhance alignment across scaling teams, and amplify the CEO’s communication to help the company flourish. Team building methods are procedures for assembling cohesive and cooperative teams that work well together. By understanding these phases, you’ll be able to calibrate where your team is and how to take it to the next phase. Whether in a team at work, in your neighborhood, or in a nonprofit organization, you can use these skills to create a better team. While a multi-million-dollar industry has grown up around books promising to make the reader a stringer team leader, there are three key skills the best leaders have mastered.

• Methods may vary based on your team’s personalities, duties, and environments.
• This process can include team building tasks, team building stages and different types of team building.
• The ed2go blog offers career insights and advice from subject matter experts.
• If every member of a baseball team chased after the ball, then a game would devolve into chaos.
• Psychologist Bruce Tuckman was the first to document the different phases that teams go through as they develop.
• The team members also usually debrief and discuss what went well and what could be improved on for projects in the future.

In order to not get bottlenecked in the storming stage, members have to work together and play to each other’s strengths to overcome obstacles and stay on pace. Also, take the time to address and overcome conflicts early on so they don’t stay an issue throughout the other phases. On-Demand DemosEmpower your team to build a culture of productive meetings with these on-demand product tutorials. Slack IntegrationCollaborate on meeting agendas, share notes, and exchange feedback – without leaving Slack. Cross-Functional MeetingsStay aligned on projects, drive progress and accountability, and improve collaboration.

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It’s easy for everyone — including you — to get in a tunnel and focus on their own lists of tasks. Make sure everyone steps back each day or week to take a look at the larger picture. Use a collaboration tool like Teamwork Spaces to organize and store your documentation.

Research in the psychology of teamwork has shown that effective collaboration can lead to improved productivity, creativity, and job satisfaction among team members (Sawyer, 2007; Salas et al., 2018). Our Emotional Intelligence Masterclass© helps boost teamwork by teaching staff to handle emotions better. The training improves communication, relationships, decision-making, job satisfaction, motivation, and overall wellbeing. It also enhances the emotional intelligence of the coach, making them better equipped to lead teams. Teams may not have the necessary resources and support from leadership to achieve their goals effectively. With the modern workplace demanding successful partnering across functional and geographical divides, fostering collaborative team working cultures becomes increasingly vital .

Team Building Exercises for the Forming Stage

For example, if the project includes updating social media, sending email marketing campaigns, or even creating lead magnets, a tool like HubSpot is great for this level of marketing automation. Before committing to a tool, give your team some time to work with it and test it out to make sure it fits their needs. Lots of tools offer free trials, so use that time to experiment and check its compatibility with other products you use.

When your team members feel comfortable with each other, it’s easier to collaborate and work together. Alternatively, if your team is having challenges meshing, it may take them longer to get work done. To guide your team as it develops, it helps to understand the stages of group development. Maybe your team is humming along in the “performing” stage, then a new person joins. Likewise, a strategic pivot for the company sends your team back to the “storming” phase. A team member must not only understand expectations and positions, but must also follow through on those duties.

Where do “Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning” come from?

They may feel sadness or a sense of loss about the changes coming to their team relationships. And at the same time, team members may feel a sense of deep satisfaction at the accomplishments of the team. Individual members might feel all of these things at the same time, or may cycle through feelings of loss followed by feelings of satisfaction. Given these conflicting feelings, individual and team morale may rise or fall throughout the ending stage. It is highly likely that at any given moment individuals on the team will be experiencing different emotions about the team’s ending. In the Performing stage, the team makes significant progress towards its goals.

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Teams with strong performance norms and high cohesiveness are high performing. The forming → storming → norming → performing model of group development was first proposed by psychological researcher Bruce Tuckman in 1965. Team members may feel a variety of concerns about the team’s impending dissolution. They may be feeling some anxiety because of uncertainty about their individual role or future responsibilities.

Team Building Stages: 5 Steps

The best team building methods are providing helpful feedback, encouraging socialization, and planning interesting and stimulating team building activities. Team building is an important part of success for any organization. You want a team that is productive, professional, and collaborative — but it won’t happen overnight. When a team is first formed, there can be uncertainty and even anxiety, but also excitement. This is normal, and is considered one of the stages of team building.

This exercise is one example of a virtual team building method for establishing connection and increasing camaraderie in a remote office environment. Casual conversations are a powerful tool for boosting camaraderie team development stages and one method of forming trusting teams. In the norming stage, team members resolve their issues and develop social harmony. Leaders have been determined, and our Leadership Suite can help them hone their skills.

Leadership strategies to facilitate successful team development

You may notice that the diagram at the beginning of this article is circular, not linear. Team building is an ongoing process, not a one-and-done operation. Your team roster may shift, outside circumstances may change, and you may need to restart the cycle. You may also find that you may need to revisit or reinforce certain steps. The team building process does not always follow the same order. You may need to spend more time on one phase than another, and may need to move backwards and re-emphasize particular competencies.

Performing stage

In this initial stage, group members gather and learn more about each other. Though some people might refer to the forming stage as “the honeymoon stage” of team building, it more closely resembles a first date. Teammates meet, discover group member strengths and weaknesses, explore the basics of the project, and form group goals. Group members designate roles and delegate responsibilities with help from team leaders. Home offices ring of solitude, save the occasional interruption from pets or children, and remote workers often report feeling lonely or disconnected from the rest of the company. Providing feedback and affirmation is also crucial in virtual offices, since limited online interactions can sow doubts about performance and esteem.

Behaviors during the Norming stage may include members making a conscious effort to resolve problems and achieve group harmony. There might be more frequent and more meaningful communication among team members, and an increased willingness to share ideas or ask teammates for help. Team members refocus on established team groundrules and practices and return their focus to the team’s tasks. Teams may begin to develop their own language or inside jokes. The most commonly used framework for a team’s stages of development was developed in the mid-1960s by Bruce W. Tuckman. Although many authors have written variations and enhancements to Tuckman’s work, his descriptions of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing provide a useful framework for looking at your own team.

Clarifying group roles

If effectively implemented, project management software allows a team to collaborate, communicate, and complete tasks efficiently. Compiled below is a list of just five project management tools to help your team better integrate and communicate. A strong team leader is the backbone of every high-performing team. Without strong leadership, teams may struggle reaching the performing stage. By developing your own leadership skills, you can model collaboration best practices and help your team reach their fullest potential. As a team leader, it’s your goal to support and empower your team to help get their highest-impact work done.

This activity helps to improve cooperation among your employees. Ask them to assign roles and complete the task within the time limit. During the performing stage, all you need is cooperation and teamwork. However, there might be issues like poor performance, lack of communication or motivation, etc. So, you need exercises that keep your teams stay cooperative, engaged, and motivated. The main focus of this activity is to minimize conflicts and improve communication and negotiation skills.

It is a period marked by conflict and competition as individual personalities emerge. Team performance may actually decrease in this stage because energy is put into unproductive activities. Members may disagree on team goals, and subgroups and cliques may form around strong personalities or areas of agreement. To get through this stage, members must work to overcome obstacles, to accept individual differences, and to work through conflicting ideas on team tasks and goals. Failure to address conflicts may result in long-term problems. Behaviors during the Storming stage may be less polite than during the Forming stage, with frustration or disagreements about goals, expectations, roles and responsibilities being openly expressed.

Leaders should assign positions and delegate tasks amongst teammates. These roles can shift and change over time, but each team member should understand the duties and functions at any particular moment. To assign roles, leaders should inventory group members’ skills, experience, knowledge, and workload, assess the components of the project, and match elements accordingly.

Feel free to return to any of the previous steps as many times as necessary. As a leader, you should acclimate your crew to a teamwork culture. Some of your employees may have always acted alone, and may need time to get used to depending on other group members. Teambuilding.com is a leading authority on team building and engagement at work.