How to successfully go through the Five Stages of Team Development

Revision as of 22:27, 11 September 2016

This wiki-article is about project management, from a human point of view. It does not pretend to analyse all possible human behaviours and how to address them; we only have 3000 words.

This article simply describes big steps of a project team that may be difficult to apprehend, and also gives concrete tips on how to recognise issues and how to tackle them. The main goal is to give the reader a general model on which he can rely on to step back during a real project.

The basic schema that will be used for the “project team” is one team leader and some team members.

The Five Stages of Team Development

Bruce Wayne Tuckman has published the model of a group development in 1965. Initially, it has only four stages; the fifth was introduced in 1977 by him and Mary Ann Jensen.

The model says that a team working on a project will inevitably go through five stages:

• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing
• Adjourning

The “Five Stages” in practice

Knowing the “Five Stages” is a good basis for someone who has to work in a group. It answers the following questions:

• What is the general atmosphere in the group?
• What are the most probable behaviours?
• What does the leader might do?

But a project is never as in theory: issues appear and must be handled. In addition to the previous questions, we will try to answer:

• What issues can appear?
• How the team members can handle it?
• How the team leader must act?