Bruce Tuckman described four stages of team development in 1965: forming, storming, norming and performing. Teams pass through them in that order, and storming is where small businesses often do damage.
Performance dips before it rises, and the dip is part of the process. A team that is always polite in meetings is often still forming.
What are the four stages in a small business?
Forming
Everyone is polite and nobody says what they think. Questions get asked of the owner rather than of each other, because nobody yet knows who decides what. Output is modest but the atmosphere is pleasant, so owners can mistake this stage for a good one.
Storming
People discover the roles overlap, the standards are not shared and the new manager does things differently. Somebody goes round the new manager to you. Somebody else says the previous way was better. Energy goes into positioning rather than work, and performance drops below where it was before the change.
Norming
The team settles how it works: who decides what, what good looks like, how disagreements get handled, what is not acceptable. Write as much of it down as you can. Performance climbs back past where it started.
Performing
The team solves things without you, argues productively and holds each other to a standard you no longer have to police. This is the stage owners describe when they say they want a proper team.
Why it matters to an owner
The clock resets often. Add two people to a team of six and it is a new team. Promote somebody over their peers and it is a new team. Restructuring, merging two functions, changing a reporting line or bringing in an operations manager all send the team back to forming.
The dip is also where owners make poor decisions. A few weeks after a change, performance is below where it was, somebody has complained, and the owner concludes they hired the wrong person or that the team cannot handle it. So they intervene — taking the decisions back, reversing the structure, or quietly letting the new manager be bypassed. Each of those returns the team to forming.
What should the owner do at each stage?
The model asks you to change your own behaviour at each stage.
Forming: be direct
Say who decides what, what good looks like and what happens this week. Ambiguity now becomes conflict later.
Storming: referee, do not rescue
Bring the disagreement into the room, let it be said properly, then make or force a decision. Smoothing it over sends it underground.
Norming: write it down and start letting go
The team will keep rules it worked out itself more readily than rules you wrote for it. Capture them on one page and hand over the decisions that go with them.
Performing: get out of the way and hold the goal
Your job shrinks to setting the direction, keeping the standard and removing obstacles. Interfering at this stage sends the team back to storming.
How to use it this month
- Name the stage for each team you have, out loud. Politeness and no disagreements often means forming, not performing.
- Stop reading conflict as disloyalty. Two capable people disagreeing about how something should work is part of storming.
- Put the argument on a table with a date: a meeting, the actual issue named, a decision made and recorded at the end.
- Refuse to be the bypass. When somebody skips their manager, send them back, warmly, every time.
- Write the norms down as they emerge — who decides, what standard, how we escalate, what we do not do.
- Do not restructure during a dip. Give a new structure two full quarters before you judge it.
The mistakes to watch for
The first mistake is expecting performing on day one because the people are experienced. Four very good people who have never worked together are at forming, and their experience makes the storming sharper rather than softer, because each of them arrives with a strong view of how this should be done.
The second is permanent forming. Some owners are so uncomfortable with conflict that they manage every relationship individually and never let the group work anything out between them. The team stays polite, dependent and slow for years, and every problem still routes through one person.
The third is treating a stage as a personality. “They are difficult” is often “we are storming and nobody has refereed it”. Change the structure of the conversation before you change the people in it.
Questions to ask yourself
- Out of 10, how comfortable are you sitting in a room where two of your people disagree in front of you?
- When did your team last change, and have you allowed for the dip since?
- Who currently comes to you with things their manager should be deciding, and what have you done about it?
- Which of your norms exist only in your head, and what would it take to write them down this week?
This is central to the team work inside Leadership Coaching. Read it with the Will/Skill Model, which tells you what each individual needs while the team is settling, and Who Is Sailing The Ship?, which explains why owners get pulled back into decisions their managers should be taking. More models are in the Mindsets library.
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Frequently asked questions
Can a team skip the storming stage?
No; a team that appears to has often postponed it. Storming is the point at which people find out that roles overlap, standards are not shared and the new manager does things differently. If nobody says any of that out loud, the disagreements do not disappear; they go into corridors and private messages, where they harden and get blamed on personalities. What you can do is shorten it. Name the decision rights early, put the real issue on a meeting agenda with a date, and make sure every argument you referee ends in a decision that gets written down.
How long does each stage take?
There is no fixed timescale. Stages move at the speed of the decisions you make, not the weeks that pass. A team whose owner names roles clearly and settles disputes quickly can be norming inside a couple of months. A team where every disagreement gets smoothed over can sit in storming for years. The practical rule for owners is to give a new structure two full quarters before judging it, because anything less means you keep interrupting the process just before the stage that would have paid you back.
Does adding one person restart the process?
Yes. A team is a set of working relationships, not a list of names, so changing the list changes the relationships. Adding a person, promoting somebody over their peers, merging two functions or changing a reporting line all send the group back towards forming and then through a period of storming. That does not mean avoiding change; it means planning for the dip and resisting the urge to reverse the decision six weeks in. Tell the team plainly that the next stretch will be bumpy, keep the decision rights clear, and let the group work out its new norms rather than imposing yours.