When you come into a high performing team you typically won’t see or be exposed to the growing pains that these teams go through. Whether in business, sports or other walks of life, all teams go through a set of phases that can be easily grouped into one of four phases – Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.
Forming
This is always the first step in building a team. The “forming” is usually through a designation by management or leadership in your organization. Picking individuals for a team based on skill, aptitude, desire or even simply availability. As this collection of individuals begins to work together, we call this the ‘forming’ stage. Team member begin to get to know one another, understand each other’s tendencies, find out what each other’s areas of skill are and just generally start to learn how they will work together.
Storming
As the group starts to work with one another, sometimes (ok, often) there will be some conflicts. This is the “storming” phase. These arise usually out of misalignment of how a task or goal is to be achieved. This is normal when teams are starting to come together. What this is indicative of is a group of individuals who are passionate about how to get the job done – this is a good thing. It takes leadership (both intrinsically and extrinsically) to overcome this and learn as individuals how to respect each other’s ideas and approaches to come up with a vision that the entire team can get behind.
Norming
As the team members begin to gel with each other, understand the collective strength of the team and shared vision, you will see the team begin to settle into a pattern of ‘doing their job’. This is also a good thing. What this is an indicator of is teams beginning to get into their ‘groove’ and become accustomed to working alongside each other. Team members understand their roles and responsibilities as well as the others on the team and become reliant on one another to do those jobs. This is the “norming” phase where teams begin to take that first big step forward as a group.
Performing
After the norming stage, you see teams elevate to the next level and become ‘performing’ teams. This is the stage where teams go from ‘just doing their job’ to really excelling and delivering great results. This stage of team development is the culmination of the time spent building the team and all the hard work that goes into building a high performing team.
High performing teams are the lifeblood of any successful services organization. Interested in learning more about QS2Point and their IQuad offering? Click here to find out more about how QS2Point can help augment your teams with their established services and development teams, utilizing some of the best talent around.
