At this stage your role as a leader is very crucial. There is a lot of anxiety and novelty in the team and your team needs your support to navigate through this safely.

• Start by building relationships and getting to know each other. You need a strong level of trust to become a high-performing team.
• Spend enough time defining a clear shared goal for the team. Identify milestones and facilitate formation of the first action plan.
• Coordinate the tasks and roles of team members.
• Introduce your team to effective problem solving practices (more about that coming soon in Tips And Tricks!)
• TOP TIP: Make it an INTENTIONAL PROCESS. This will prove to be invaluable later on. How to do it? Simple. Just help your team to come up with what their expectations, concerns, needs and wishes Establish open communication from the beginning.

• What kind of a team would they enjoy being part of?
• What behaviours from the team members would make them feel supported?
• What are their expectations?
• What concerns come to their mind?
• What are their expectations from your (leader’s) side? – follow this up by making a commitment to them. Tell them that if they support you and deliver on their promises, you will too. And stick to it.
• What are they offering to the team?
• What are they best at?
• What do they need more support in?

Open communication does wonders. Taking the time to have this conversation shows that you care. It shows you are ready to support them. It builds trust and commitment. If you go out of your way to deliver on your promises, your team will go out of their way to deliver on theirs.

The second stage offers you an amazing opportunity to practice your coaching skills. This is when the true colours of individuals start to show – both for the good and the bad. This period is when the “STORMING” comes in.

• When interpersonal conflicts start to show, revisit the conversation about the kind of a team the members want to be part of.
• Explore what needs to happen for this to become a reality.
• Train your team to have difficult conversations effectively without creating friction or making it personal (more on this coming in another Tips and Tricks entry soon, so stay tuned!)
• Work on creating a psychologically safe environment. (Read more about psychological safety here: Google Approved Team Productivity Recipe )
• Lead your team with questions. Approach problems together with mutual curiosity about how to best solve them.
• Make sure that during meetings everyone gets to express If someone is displaying overpowering behaviour, address it on a 1-to-1 basis. If someone isn’t willing to voice their opinions, find out what the reason behind it is and help them to open up.

Well done, you are almost there! Your team should have some solid ground to stand on at this point. This is the stage of “NORMING”. Your role is to empower your team to truly adopt the behaviours you have been discussing and make them their default.

• • If a conflict arises, empower your team to solve it the way you have trained them to. If a problem arises, support your team to find the solution using the processes you have put in place. You are empowering them with the aim for them to be able to work independently without you around.
  • Address any potentially “dangerous” behaviours (like overpowering, blaming, finger-pointing, prioritizing individual goals over team goals) that any of the team members are displaying. The aim is to raise self-awareness of the implications that such behaviour brings into the team.
  • Speak less.

If necessary, offer support with questions:

• What do we do now?
• What is working?
• How can we make it better?
• What should we be doing more of?
• What should we be doing less of?
• What is the most important thing?
• What have we not explored yet?

You have arrived safely to the PERFORMING stage! This is impressive. Only a small number of teams ever makes it to this stage. It is time for you to sit back a little. Your team should be able to manage all day-to-day decisions and problems effectively on their own, using the processes in place.

• Check-in regularly with your team
• Make sure they know they still have your full support in case they need it
• Celebrate their progress
• Ask for feedback and what could be improved
• Continue supporting positive relationships and mutual trust
• Think about other learning and development opportunities your team or its individual members might need.
• Show appreciation and allow members to take on bigger and bigger responsibilities. Progress is key!

At any point a team can go back to any of the previous stages. If that happens, be ready to step in and offer as much support as necessary. After all, this is your team and you want them to do well, don’t you?

As Henry Ford once said:

Think about the early stages when your team came together and you didn’t really know each other, you didn’t know who the other people are, how they work and what their preferences are. This stage is usually marked with feelings of excitement, politeness, anxiety, hesitation, lack of clarity and avoidance of conflict. Everyone on the team tries to be on their best behaviour, avoiding friction. Have you experienced this before? How did it feel? Make a note about all that you remember.

This stage is called FORMING. It is the beginning of the journey.

The duration of each period varies from team to team. For some the forming period can take weeks, for some it is over in a few days. What comes next is called the STORMING period and yes, it can be just as turbulent as it sounds. Unfortunately, some teams never properly get out of this period. Are you wondering what is causing the “storm” at this stage? Nothing more and nothing less than true human nature. At this stage the ultimate politeness of the team members starts slipping away and their true selves start to show – both for the good and the bad.

Here are some implications this brings: the decision making gets less smooth as people open up more and voice their opinions louder. This can lead to first interpersonal conflicts. The dominant members become loud, overpowering the quieter members of the team. There can be signs of tension as people try to establish their roles. The leader’s position of power can get challenged, alongside with the structure and the rules. The purpose of the team becomes clearer, however, there is still a lot of uncertainty.

How intense was this stage for the team you were part of? How did you manage to get through it? What helped? Write it down.

If the storming period is managed well, the team is rewarded with coming into a calmer NORMING stage which is a more positive place to be.

In this stage the team members start to focus less on their individual goals and channel their energy into processes and procedures that help them work together more effectively. How long did it take your team to get to the norming stage? What were some rules, norms and procedures that your team came up with?

At this point commitment level in the team heightens, people accept their responsibilities and cooperation becomes more natural and comfortable following a defined problem-solving process. The team is becoming more independent from the leader. Did your team get to this stage? Did you notice how much easier working together got?

Only the high-performing teams get to this idyllic stage called PERFORMING. Have you ever been to this mysterious place? Here is what happens: there is mutual trust in the team, relationships are strong, there is a drive to accomplish a shared vision which enables the team to make decisions and problem-solve at a fast pace. The team is able to function without the need of being supervised. All the team needs from the leader is support. That sounds like a good place to be at, doesn’t it?

If your team has ever reached this place, congratulations! It is a wonderful achievement and this is where the biggest market breakthroughs happen. Not only do people love what they do, they become incredibly good at it as well.