Team lifecycle
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither are teams.
The team’s development cycle was coined by Bruce Tuckman almost 60 years ago. It has 4 stages:
- Forming: when people come together to form a team – their performance level is at best – average.
- Storming: performance quickly goes down when these people start storming different ideas on how to work together.
- Norming: that’s when performance hits the rock bottom. After some time team has to come to some compromise and agree on standard norms for how they shall work together.
- Performing: only after these norms become standard practices in the team – does the team’s performance goes up (see the pic below).
Now, THIS PROCESS TAKES TIME!
For any team to achieve high performance – it needs time to go through the 3 stages before they reach the high-performance stage.
From my experience, it takes 3-6 months for a team to get there. And you need someone taking care for the team – pushing for this growth in the team. Your Agile Coach/ Scrum Master is a typical suspect.
Throughout the development cycle one has to carefully monitor the team’s growth & performance; take carefully prepared steps to resolve any conflicts, impediments, or roadblocks for the team to get to the next level.
It may take a lot of observation, mentorship, coaching, and facilitation (training, workshops, meetings, 1:1s). This all grows the team’s maturity and helps it to get to high performance.
To learn more about how I steer the teams through Deming’s cycle and grow their maturity and high performance – download my free ‘how-to-guide’ for setting up the teams:
