Cobra Effect · People and organisations
Tuckman’s stages
Why new teams have to fight before they can work well.
7 cards, read aloud in 2:22, with a test and sources.
Week one, the new team is delightful. Week five, it is at war.
Everyone was courteous in the first meetings. Now two people cannot agree on anything and a third has gone silent. The manager decides she has hired badly.
1965. Bruce Tuckman reads fifty studies of small groups.
Many were therapy groups. Others were teams at work. The same sequence kept turning up, whatever the group had been assembled for. He gave the stages names that rhyme, which is why we still use them.
Forming. Storming. Norming. Performing.
Forming is the polite stage, where nobody tests anything. Storming is the fight about who decides and what matters. Norming is when the rules settle, and performing is when the work finally flows.
The part everyone misses. The fight is a stage, not a failure.
A group that has never argued has not agreed. It has postponed. The argument is how a team finds out what it actually believes. Skip it and it returns later, quieter and far more expensive.
What a manager should do is different in each stage.
In the polite stage, be clear about the goal and who does what. In the fight, do not smooth it over. Keep it about the work and keep it in the open. Once the rules settle, get out of the way.
In 1977 he added a fifth stage, for the end.
Adjourning. The group finishes, breaks up, and people feel it more than they expect. Tuckman added it with Mary Ann Jensen after revisiting the model. Endings need marking, or the next team starts with unfinished business.
When a team turns sour, check the calendar before the people.
Ask how long the group has been together, not who is being difficult. Real groups do not always move through the stages in that order, so treat it as a pattern and not a timetable. Name the stage out loud. It calms a room down.
Sources
- Tuckman’s stages of group development, Wikipedia. The four stages, the fifth added later, and the limits of the model. For the original, search for Developmental sequence in small groups, Psychological Bulletin, 1965.
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni, 2002. A management fable whose central claim is that teams avoiding conflict are not healthy, they are stuck. Read it as a practical companion, not as evidence.
- Group development, Wikipedia. The wider field, including the rival models that describe groups lurching rather than climbing neatly through stages.
Nearby ideas
- Psychological safety. Teams only learn from the mistakes they feel safe to admit.
- Groupthink. How close, loyal teams talk themselves into bad decisions.
- Brooks’s law. Adding people to a late project makes it later.
- The Robbers Cave experiment. Rival groups make peace when they need each other, not when they mix.
- The ninety-ninety rule. The last tenth of a project takes as long as the first nine.
- Span of control. Why a manager can only really lead a handful of people.
- Broken windows theory. Visible neglect invites more of it, though the crime claims are contested.
- Parkinson’s law. Work expands to fill the time you give it.