Thinking in team stages

When we think about team development we often refer to the 5 team stages, forming storming, norming, performing and transforming. Ideally most leaders want to move through the early stages quickly and have the team norming along heading towards performing. The question is can you speed this up?

At the heart of each stage is understanding. Understanding builds trust and trust means people will share more. More sharing , more caring, simple right!

Well sort of.

Lets look at forming a new team to work on a specific project. The aim is to build a team with right skills and experiences most suited to the task as hand. If that is a project team then a diverse range of skills and knowledge are brought together to best serve the client. Each persons background is unique and while the skill itself might be generic, lets take coding as an example, the application and situations that the skill has been applied may vary greatly. Therefore the persons experiences become just as important as the skill itself. This is the creativity that need to be uncovered in team situations. It's the gold.

In the forming stage of team development trust is typically low, no one want to rock the boat, speak up or speak out. Project teams need to move through this phase quickly but how? Start by asking the team these questions:

• What is our purpose in this project and what outcome do we need?

• What information do we have and what don't we know yet? How will we find out?

• How do we want to work on this project, have we got a solid plan?

• Who is involved and who else might we need?

Spending time on the fundamentals , mapping these answers out and creating a solid basis for the team to go forward is essential to building a cohesive team quickly.

In my next blog I'll discuss the Forming stage of team development and how better thinking can help overcome conflict in teams.