Chapter 29
Moving Teams through Stages toward Success
Way back in the 1970s,
psychologist B.W. Tuckman identified four stages of team development that he
felt all teams had to pass through in order to be successful. They are:
ü
Forming:
When a group is just learning to deal with one another; time in which minimal
work gets accomplished.
ü
Storming: A
time of stressful negotiation of the terms under which the team will work
together; a trial by fire.
ü
Norming: A
time in which roles are accepted, team feeling develops, and information is
freely shared.
ü
Performing:
When optimal levels are finally realized -- in productivity, quality,
decision-making, allocation of resources, and interpersonal interdependence.
With or without tests or team-building sessions, all successful
teams go through all four of these stages. Sometimes a team gets lucky, and its
mix of personalities, or the kinds of leadership that emerges among its
members, brings the group from Forming to Performing with a minimum of
struggle. But no team goes directly from Forming to Performing. Struggle and
adaptation are critical, difficult, but very necessary parts of team
development.
Identifying where your team is
along the pathway towards success and how to move it from one stage to the next
with minimum resistance are important factors distinguishing great teams from
dysfunctional ones.
Forming is that stage in the
development team when everything is up for grabs, and when a team is only a
team in the loosest sense of the word. The talent may all be right there in
front of you. Good engineers, good planners, good production people, good
finance staff. But like a drill sergeant surveying his newest platoon on the
first day of boot camp, you've never seen such a ragtag bunch of unsoldierly
individuals in all your born days.
Did you ever, as a kid, transfer
to a new school? Remember what that first day felt like? Walking to school you
had one burning desire for the year, to do well, like Mom and Dad said. Once
you took your place among all the other faces, however, all that changed. What
mattered, instead, was being accepted by all these strangers. They were going
to be important adjuncts in your life for the foreseeable future, and you wanted
them to like you.
That overwhelming need to fit in,
meanwhile, was met with a certain native opposition to adapting. No one wants
to run up the white flag, unconditionally surrendering his or her personal
identity -- we all want to remain ourselves even while we fit into the group.
We want "more information" on what we've gotten ourselves into. We
want to know who's in charge, and what they're likely to require of us.
It's exactly the same with teams.
We ache to plunge in, but first we need to know how cold the water is. That is
the ambivalent mindset we bring to joining new teams. One of the signs of a
team at the Forming stage is an overweening politeness, a bending over
backwards to be pleasant, not to offend, not to ruffle feathers. Everyone has
his 15-seconds of self-introduction, then sits down, eyes darting nervously.
This is understandable when you consider that manners are generally instituted
to keep strangers from frightening one another -- the hand extended in
friendship supposedly is an ancient way of demonstrating that one is bringing
peaceful intentions to the relationship, not a blackjack.
This eagerness to appear
non-threatening is really a key to how threatening Forming usually is: people
getting together for the first time with all sorts of questions about which
members have power and whether they will share it, and with whom, doubts about
one's own abilities and the abilities of others, and prejudices about the types
of people one is likely to be paired off against.
Amid these unsettling feelings,
people cast about anxiously for something -- anything -- to form temporary
alliances around. It can be something as simple as two people smoking the same
of brand of cigarettes, a preference for the same vein of humor, or being about
the same height, or having worked with competing businesses in the past.
Anything that pairs or triads can use to derive feelings of safety from the
larger group. (Formimg is the birthplace of the clique.)
During the Forming stage,
potential teammates identify similarities and expectations of outcomes, agree
on the team's purpose and identify possible resources and skill sets. They get
to know each other and begin to bond, evaluate trust levels and, as much as
possible, communicate personal needs.
The challenge of Forming is the
challenge of giving an inert group of people who don't know each other a
collective kickstart. Here are some of the questions which a group in Forming,
in order to get going with a minimum of pain, must answer:
v
Why was I asked to participate on this team?
v
Whose idea was the formation of this team?
v
Why were we formed?
v
Who are the other members, and what are their
strengths?
v
How am I going to find out what they're good at, and
also let them know of my capabilities and characteristics?
v
How large should the team be in order to accomplish the
team goal quickly?
v
Should team membership be voluntary or mandatory?
v
How and when are we going to bring needed resources
onto the team, and get rid of them when they're no longer needed?
People who are new to one another
cast about desperately for subject matter. All too typically they alight on the
organization itself, and establish some signal with one another that it is OK
to poke fun at the company. Within moments of being put together they can be hard
at work fashioning a caricature of the company they work for -- so like the
drawings of "Teacher" that got them in trouble in the fourth grade,
still a way to achieve an easy, preliminary consensus twenty and forty years
later. Someone or something must pay the price, serve as the safety valve, for
the tension in a group just getting together.
Forming is a time of great
danger. First impressions are made, and then set in concrete. Aggressive
personalities move quickly to establish dominance. Alliances are formed, and
counter-alliances. Signals are flashed back and forth, mysterious even to the
transmitters. While the mass of group members silently mouth the words, Why are we here?, a few individuals may
try to provide their own.
Besides team size and configuration,
other issues must be resolved early on. Who "owns" the team? Does
management own you, or do you own yourselves? By ownership, we mean commitment.
Typically a new group has a weak focus on its sense of purpose, and therefore
has a hard time feeling very proprietary about what it's doing. In Forming,
ownership is virtually all management's. But before a team comes full circle,
it will reverse those proportions, and will feel a bond of commitment so strong
it will have at least a few insecure people in top management scratching their
heads. The team must eventually belong to the team, not to management. Nor may
it belong to the groups each team member (of cross-functional teams)
represents.
The biggest monkey wrench a team
member can throw into a problem-solving session is the statement, "We'll
take that back to the division and see what my people will say." Yes,
that's how the rest of the world works. It "sounds" good; it sounds
responsible and politic. It buys time. It spares members the pain of saying no
today. But it's not how effective teams operate. There, members come to the
table already empowered; they wouldn't be on the team if they didn't have the
authority to make judgments for their groups on their own. If a team member
insists on taking every decision back to "the membership," it's
probably time to push the button on his EJECT seat. Oh, and while you're at it,
take this back to "your people": Sproing.
A final consideration: Who is a
member and who is not? We have seen teams struggle with the drag weight of
members who would rather be vacuuming the Mojave Desert than participating on
the team. In some cases, it was because they were intransigent jerks. In many,
many cases, however, it was not their fault -- they truly were too busy, or
they truly were convinced that another approach was better than the one the
team was moving toward. But they were afraid to "drop out" lest they
experience dire repercussions in their chosen career fields.
Management must be very, very
honest -- with the team and with itself -- and it must say, in the most
unmistakable terms possible, "No one will be punished if they decline to
participate on this team. No recriminations and no ramifications, no loyalty
oaths, no blacklists, no demotions. You have our permission to leave."
This is still not perfect. Few
team members will walk away cheerfully, naive enough to think no one noticed
them beating their hasty retreat, and no one will remember or retaliate for
their departure. The work world will probably inflict pain on persons who quit
their teams. That's regrettable. But the team is better off without them.
One of the greatest dangers of
all is that someone in the group, a quick study, will want to push forward too
quickly, to vault over Storming and Norming, and to go directly into
Performing. The quick study may feel there is no time to waste, and much
progress to be achieved by sprinting to the finish line. But there are no
shortcuts to team development. For now, the most important job for this team is
not to build a better rocket or debug a beta version of a new software product
or double sales -- it is to orient itself to itself.
It is estimated that three fifths
of the length of any team project, from start to finish, is taken up with the
first two stages, Forming and Storming. In German literature there is a style
characterized as sturm und drang,
"storm and stress," referring to an exaltation of individual
sensibilities.
The same could be said to apply
to Storming as the pathway to teambuilding. Rank with individual emotion, group
conflict, and change, Storming is not for the squeamish. The best that can be
said for it is, it is necessary, and it gets things out of the way. What a team
fails to settle during Storming will surely return to haunt it at a later date
-- and probably to return the team, kicking and screaming, to the eye of its
own Storm.
There has never been a team that
was not first tested in the Storming phase. And Storming always comes as a
surprise, no matter how well one prepares for it. The best one can hope for is
that it not drag on forever, as a gruesome war of attrition that no faction can
win. To prevent that there are some guidelines teams still in formation may
follow: Leadership is of paramount importance. If you are the
"leader" of a new team and you leave them all alone to sort out their
conflicts, writing them a blank check to take as long as the sorting-out takes,
shame on you.
Now is the time to be stepping
in, explaining limits, offering suggestions, keeping a lid on the inevitable
anarchy. You do not want Storming to outgrow the office, spill over into the
lunchroom, run riot in the streets and finally head down the street, torches
ablaze, pitchforks poised, toward the Bastille. You're not ready for that yet.
During Forming the leader's role
was essentially directive -- he or she pointed out where people were headed
until the group could configure its own bearings. During Storming the leader
continues to direct traffic, but he or she takes on the additional role of the
coach -- the person who not only tells you what to do, but helps with
suggestions on how to get there.
Coaching is critical because
Storming is where the most important dimensions of a team are worked out -- its
goals, its roles, its relationships, identifying likely barriers, and the
infrastructure support mechanisms necessary to sustain long-term team health.
Together with its goals, which the team began establishing during Forming,
clarifying and implementing these other four elements comprise the entire
agenda of teaming.
The coach is there to help, but
not to interfere. It is a delicate tightrope-walking act that he or she has to
put on, because morale may dip to new lows, and hostilities will emerge and
demand some kind of reaction. One rule we try to impress is that you can say
just about anything, but that personal destructiveness will be frowned upon,
and probably squashed like a bug. Sniping, blaming, and belittling remarks that
have no bearing on the work of the team are pure poison -- to the targeted
individual, but also to the sense of trust necessary for the team to function
as a whole.
When you first see signs of
personal poison bubbling to the surface, that's when it's time to call time
out. People have work to do -- tormenting one another is not merely wrong, it's
irrelevant to the team's mission.
As with Forming, there are
questions during Storming that need answering for the group to make progress.
They include:
v What
are we supposed to accomplish as a team?
v
What are each of our roles and responsibilities, as
they relate to accomplishing the goal?
v
Who do each of us need to get information from, and to
whom does our information have to go in order to complete our goal? Where are
our linkages to the outside world?
v
If we get into trouble, who can we get to rescue us?
Who will accept the responsibility of sponsoring this group and its activities?
v
Who's in charge? Will that change from day to day, from
one phase of the project to the next? How do we adapt to changing leadership?
v
How will we arrive at decisions? When will we know we
have done that?
v
What happens when we fight? How do we resolve
disagreements over goals or procedures?
v
How do we increase our ability to take risks till we
get to the most direct, most creative level?
v
What strengths do each of us bring to bear on
accomplishing our goal? How can we focus our strengths to influence activities
outside our own team?
v
When will we meet, and how (large groups, small groups,
one-on-one, etc.)?
v
How are we going to make ourselves more accessible to
one another in order to complete our goals in a timely manner?
v
Where (or who) are the team's supports? Where (or who)
are our detractors and stumbling blocks?
A team that manages to answer
those questions in the early going of Storming will minimize the pain of a
necessarily painful process. Remember that Storming takes as much time as there
are issues in need of resolution. It is not a difficult task for teams made up
of like-minded individuals -- all design engineers, say. Cross-functional teams
are by nature made up of primarily unlike-minded individuals.
Ask and answer these questions on a regular basis,
and you can change the name of the stage from storming to clarifying.
The storm is no longer an unpredictable, destructive thunderhead front that
approaches, drops rain, and blows itself out. It's more like an irrigation
system that you can turn on and off at will, challenging the team on a regular,
structured basis to root out the differences of opinion that lurk, unspoken.
Leaders will want to run periodic
checks on their own status. Are they still the leader, or has a coup already
occurred, without bloodshed? Often leaders are deposed, usually without
animosity. If you are deposed on the grounds that someone else within the team
is a more natural internal leader, chill. Chances are management knew this
would happen all along, that your job, which was to get the group cranked up,
has been accomplished. You may continue as a conduit of information to higher
management. You may find you truly have become unnecessary, a sixth finger, and
you may wish to move on to new challenges, or just go fishing.
In any event, these things happen
during Storming. The only wrong reaction in such a circumstance is to get all
defensive. No insult was intended. The group you helped form has made its first
decision.
Leaders should understand the
signs of Storming. Storming is hope mingled with a large dose of fear. During
Storming, every team member is wondering if he is respected by the others. Some
members will be hostile or overzealous. Some will be intimidated. Pulses will
race. Sleep will be lost. Jealousy and infighting, competition and polarization
are the orders of the day. Alliances which seemed solid one day come crashing
apart the next. Some individuals will rush too soon into the cauldron and offer
to be boiled down into "team." Others will resist membership, the
compromise of their individuality, their standoffishness, as if their lives
depended on it.
The worst news of all for leaders
is that Storming extracts a terrible toll from them personally. Among the many
charming occurrences in mid-Storm is a rash of blaming that generally trashes
leadership at all levels. Suddenly, you're the reason the group can't coalesce,
you're the reason deadlines aren't met, you're the reason individuals feel
unfulfilled, misunderstood, deadended. As team members wrestle with their
identity and direction, leaders are led out for judgment, sometimes gagged and
bound.
We have seen leaders go
white-knuckled with rage at the accusations teams needed to trump up as far of
their "rite of passage." You weren't there when we needed you, is a
common refrain. You only cared about yourself, they say, to an individual who
may have lost sleep every night for a year because they couldn't get their act
together, while the leader grappled with deciding how to intervene, and whether
to intervene.
It can hilarious to watch, when a
leader who has been patronizing his team is suddenly made aware of that fact
(hilarious so long as you're not the leader, anyway). More often, though, it is
just a painful ordeal. Like all developmental stages, there is no alternative
to riding out the Storm. If it is any comfort, we offer to leaders the solace
that what at first sight appeared to be a "personality conflict" is
really nothing of the sort. And that may be the saving beauty of Storming -- it
truly is about team formation, and only superficially about personalities.
One of the most challenging
events in the life of a team is the introduction of new members. Say that your
team got through the Storming phase -- it took six months from your company's
lifeblood. The very last thing you want to see happening with that project is a
return to those halcyon days of yore. But that's what often happens when
someone new is thrown in with an established team. That person will say things
like, "But that isn't how we did it at Hyperion," and "We need
to talk about some of these procedures from the ground up."
It's human nature to want new
team members to feel welcome, and for them to be quickly and cleanly folded in
with the rest of the group. But their earnest suggestions that the game return
to GO and start over again may have to be resisted, or redirected. The very
best thing to do with new team members is to take them aside, for a week if
necessary, and bring them up to speed on the history of the team, the decisions
it has made and committed itself to, and the reasons why it is perilous to drag
them all back to Square One in order to help orient a single new member.
Some people will object that it
is too expensive to train new people so exhaustively, to answer all their
questions, that "they won't be able to absorb" all the new
information in one fell swoop. The answer is that it is far more expensive to
leave the newcomer with a head full of questions, and the potential any loose
cannon has to blow a hole through the deck.
Another option is what we call
the "modified limited backslide," in which you permit the group to
reenter the Storming phase, in order to orient new individuals or re-hash an
unsolved problem, but with the strong proviso that Storming be brought to a
clear conclusion by a pre-set deadline. You may have to swallow hard before
take this step, but sometimes, when the group shows signs it needs to
reevaluate its direction, it is imperative. If you do not signal a retreat, the
troops will bug out on their own.
Storming is the stage at which a
few people will decide to stonewall. They still show up for work, and they may
still communicate with other team members, after a fashion. But if you look
closely at their behaviors, it becomes clear that the team at hand is not the
team they wanted, so they have decided against being enthusiastic members.
Sometimes an entire team
graduates from storming except for one individual, yet it finds itself unable
to go onto the next stage -- the holdout has them all by the shirt-tails,
keeping them in place, while he storms on. For an individual like this, there
are only two sensible options -- to get with the team, or get out. At the same
time, the team and the company owe him a second chance, maybe even a third
chance, to reconsider his standoffishness and join the team.
Perhaps the worst consequence of
Storming is that production may be at a standstill for weeks, even months at a
time. For management, that is the bottom line of Storming -- wasted time and
blown projects. Somehow this chaotic process must be kept from mutating into
ongoing turmoil.
To the extent that we can say
that the process of teamwork works, it is in the minimizing of this necessary
but painful period in the life of a group. The best analogy we have yet heard
for Storming is that it is like internal combustion. If you place a teaspoon of
gasoline on a sidewalk it quickly disperses, more or less harmlessly.
Compressed in an engine cylinder, however, its vaporized particles begin to
bounce into one another at supersonic speeds. Ideally, a controlled explosion
occurs, and a vehicle many thousands of times the weight and size of that
teaspoon of fuel begins to move.
When that happens, the Storm has
broken. Roles clarify. A team style begins to materialize. The sun returns to
the sky, and a calmer, new day dawns for everyone.
With the passing of the storm
comes a new alignment and acceptance of roles within the team. The success
experienced during the Norming stage is a success marked by contradiction --
that the group becomes stronger as individuals let down key defenses,
acknowledge weaknesses, and ask for help from people with compensating
strengths.
The Norming stage is defined by
acceptance of the very roles that Storming raged against. Relationships which
began in the Forming stage as superficial events -- coincidences of cigarette
brands, favorite jokes, and alma maters -- have the opportunity to deepen
during Norming.
What's more, the group itself can
finally be said to have a relationship with itself. It can show affection for
individual members in the form of banter and repartee (often a male response),
and genuine consideration. During Norming the ragged edges of conflict begin to
subside. Tension ebbs, and many individuals now poke their heads out, like
forest creatures after a summer downpour, to realize it is OK to come out of
hiding.
What has happened is that the
hidden agendas covertly advanced by members during Storming ("I want to
lead," "I want to be left alone," "I reserve the right to
disagree on any subject at any time") have been unmasked, or have
diminished in importance. People's needs to assert their dominion over the
group, whether actively or passively, shrink in proportion to the growth of
their intimate knowledge of the group.
As the group becomes less
threatening, so do individual members mount fewer threats against it. Even
individuals who are still conflicted tend to keep conflict from bubbling over
and affecting other people's work -- people take care not to derail or sabotage
the hard-won feeling of teamhood the group now enjoys.
As group members become more
docile, so does the group as a group gain in focus and unanimity. A splendid
dynamic of peeling-away occurs, in which every dismantled individual defense is
used to shore up the group instead. "Weaknesses" are reconstituted as
strengths. Information is freely shared, and the group conducts periodic agenda
checks to remind itself of its goals and take note of its progress.
During Forming leaders were
critical to get the group going. During Storming leaders were the sacrificial
victim, as struggling teams groped to achieve consensus at the leaders'
expense. Now, during Norming, formal leadership begins to fade, as important
data is no longer exclusive to leadership. In the next stage, Performing,
leadership becomes a part of everyone's job, and mutual interdependence becomes
the order of the day.
For the first time, the group may
be pictured as a kind of great hulking beast, now able to move in a single
direction, if haltingly, upon command. Before long, the great beast will be
doing the meringue. For the first time, the group is a true team.
There is no guarantee that your
team will make it as far as Performing. As Hamlet said, in one of his reveries
on team-playing , "'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished." The
workforces of America are riddled with teams that never emerge from Storming,
who continue to batter or ignore one another. They may call what they are doing
every day from nine to five Performing, but the numbers are never there, and
neither is the feeling.
Performing is not workaholism. In
a way, it's the opposite, because it is the admission by every member of the
team that he or she cannot do the job all by him- or herself. This is a level
of genuine commitment to company goals and objectives that may be new to
individual team members. A workaholic, by contrast, is someone who works every
weekends. Workaholics think they're indispensable, and the rest of the world
are morons.
Performers know the real worth of
everyone they work with. Performing team members don't get all bent out of
shape if they're called over the weekend to help solve a pressing problem.
Performing means being sufficiently in touch with one's own needs and
requirements that one can fashion a work schedule that assures progress in team
projects, without twisting one's own priorities beyond recognition.
Performing is a time of great
personal growth among team members. With the sharing of the experiences,
feelings, and ideas of other team members comes a new level of consciousness --
the sense of knowing where other team members are at, a sense of fierce loyalty
even to members you may not be friendly with, and a willingness to find a way
through nearly any challenge that arises.
Performing means that the team
becomes "fly-eyed" -- seeing with many eyes instead of just two. This
means a reduction in blind spots. It means that the team, encountering an
elephant blindfolded, will be able to identify it as exactly what it is -- an
elephant.
Performing means intimacy. With
performing, members may move beyond the locker-room banter of playful teasing,
into a dimension of communicating that is less self-conscious and less afraid.
The humor may linger on, but the little missiles we fire at one another
throughout the workday may be disarmed. The humor will reflect a lesser degree
of veiled aggression, and a greater degree of caring. Intimacy means
understanding that a job is much more than "a job" -- that one's
pride, livelihood, and chances for happiness, security and fulfillment are all
riding on these balky contracts with our employers.
Intimacy means acknowledging the
seriousness of individual team members' requirements, and pooling together to
help ensure that every member succeeds, with the help of every other member.
Conflict does not filter into the upper atmosphere during Performing. Indeed,
it is more in evidence than ever. Perhaps it is because it is put on the table,
and not reshuffled into the deck, that Performing works so well. Disagreements
are confronted, discussed, considered, and adjudicated.
What during Storming seemed destructive
-- people at odds over project and turf issues -- seems during Performance to
be healthy, and positive. Once the argument is resolved, team members resume
working together. "Losing" an argument doesn't mean you get roasted;
"winning" doesn't mean you get to scorch the loser. The order of the
day during performing is, "a good, clean fight." The atmosphere is
one of enthusiasm, and esprit de corps.
Best of all, apart from all this
progress in the feelgood dimension, is that the team is going great guns.
Deadlines are being met, production is up to par, and the speed of information
flow defies the usual mechanism of memo routing, weekly meetings, and quality
checks. People are getting their work done, properly on time, and in
coordinated sequence.
And the word goes out throughout
the company, throughout the region: Look
out for the team over in [your project name goes here], I think they're on to something.
They're on to something, all
right. It's called teamwork.
![[IMAGE]](http://mfinley.com/gif/new-teams-cover.jpg)
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