The Tuckman's Team Performance stages

 

As program managers, project managers, scrum masters, or agile coaches we need to constantly work with teams and help them effectively work together quickly.

Social and Psychological skills which include self-awareness, Empathy & Emotional Intelligence play a vital role in building high-performing teams. Every time we bring new people together to work on a project, we create a new team but just because they are one team doesn’t mean those folks are working as a team.

Everyone wants to be part of high-performing teams and lead them, but these teams do not appear magically. Leaders need to work towards creating efficient teams.

Last year I had a chance to be an agile coach for a few teams, the team composition was 60% existing staff and 40% new staff. In this article, I'll share the application of certain techniques, learnings, and observations.

 The goal I set for myself was to get them to high performing team in 3 months and some of them were already between Storming and Norming state. But I saw them oscillating between Forming & Storming often and we missed consistency.

 Going to the basics was my next step, I planned to get these teams to the Performing state and created a few action items so I could serve the team to get to the Performing state.

While My BHAG was” To get these teams to Performing state in 3 months”, I had to face many challenges as I was also new to the whole team dynamics. The biggest hurdle was to build trust and that took a long time, I had a feeling I might fail but my Emotional quotient, my commitment to fulfill people's promises, empathy towards teams, open communication, and being vulnerable by sharing my fears and slowing down helped me build trust with teams (at least with most of them 😊).

 

The Tuckman model describes four phases that squads go through as they form a team to deliver organizational goals. In the below table, I’ve documented a series of steps that were taken to promote the whole team to the next level.

This may not be a recipe that you could take and execute as is, I will suggest making modifications to the below content based on your team dynamics and environment.

Some of the benefits of Having High-Performance Teams are High morale of the employees and Increased client satisfaction.

I would like to know your opinions and thoughts on my observations and share how I could have pivoted to get faster results.