Forming is the term that Bruce Tuckman chose to use in his 1965 paper ‘Developmental Sequence in Small Groups’ to describe what happens when a group of people first come together with a common purpose.  Together, Forming and the following three stages that he defined – Storming, Norming and Performing – have become an enduring foundation stone of our modern understanding of group dynamics.

The word has a lot of resonance for me as a convenient label to put on that complex mixture of anticipation, nervousness, competitiveness, hyper-awareness and cynicism that I feel when entering a room full of a new project team for the first time.  It’s a stage of activity that I really enjoy but I have found that a lot of people dread it more than any other.

As the team move into the Storming phase extreme emotions can come to the fore.  When asked, people talk of feeling sick, trying to come up with avoidance plans, becoming ultra shy and withdrawn or overly aggressive. As the situation and the people become more familiar the team enters the Norming stage where they begin to empathise with each other and pull in the same direction.  For some teams these first three stages can go on for a long time, in my experience frequently up to 80% of the time allocated for the actual work of a project team.  For a BAU (business as usual) work team whose members change often due to re-organisation or staff turnover the team sometimes never reaches the Performing stage at all.

So in the words of Bruce Tuckman they never reach the point where:

“Finally, the group becomes a functional instrument for dealing with the task. Interpersonal problems lie in the group’s ‘past’, and its present can be devoted to realistic appraisal of and attempt at solutions to the task at hand.”

It really doesn’t need to be that way.

One of my goals as a change manager, project manager or group coach is to move the team through the first three stages as quickly and painlessly as possible.  I use a range of tools from warm-up exercises to conflict role play to encourage the team to build their emotional intelligence and develop a trusting and supportive environment.  This results in a team that can focus quickly on tasks and problems, that can analyse mistakes and engineer improvements openly and honestly, that can innovate with creativity and fearlessness. Once a team has been through this process they will never view a new team with quite so much trepidation again.