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How teams work.

It's a peculiar fact of human society, that while we need to form people into teams to get significant projects completed, it's not easy because people often don't work well together. For this reason there's been a considerable interest in team building in the West since the Second World War.

An academic paper by researcher Dr Bruce Tuckman, published in 1965, has come to be regarded as the correct description of how teams build and function. In this ground-breaking paper, Tuckman said teams build through four distinct stages which he cleverly named forming, storming, norming and performing.

Tuckman's conclusion seems to have a ring of truth about it, as researchers since have widely agreed that when a team forms its members will first want to know about the other members, will need to adjust to them, will probably have arguments, and may after some time become harmonious and productive.

Bruce Tuckman called the first stage in a team's life Forming.

At the beginning of a team's life, even if the team is older and many of the members are new, the group tends to spend time to get to know members and team rules, and usually they will depend on each other or what the group did earlier.

Then the Storming starts.

A good name for the conflict that often springs up between new team members and influences how they work at their particular jobs on the team. It is a kind of resistance to being pushed around by the team.

This need not last, though, as another, Norming, period takes the place of the conflict.

The people begin to tell each other what they personally think, they gell into a group, and a new team norm develops and is agreed to.

When this happens the team enters the final stage in Tuckman's original list: Performing.

This is what the team's supervisor has been waiting for. It's the time when great amounts of work is finished. Team members agree and work together. A huge amount of work gets done.

Tuckman further developed this four-stage model in the years after his original paper was published. But today the broad outline of these four stages is widely accepted even now. He found them in the journals of the 1960s, managed to put them down clearly on paper, assigned those wonderful names to each stage, and left for us a way of studying how small teams develop that is grounded in what is real.