Tuckman’s Model

Tuckman’s Model

We’ve recently covered team size, Dunbars number, and the effect that team sizes has on performance and psychological safety. In this issue, we’re going to take a little look at team longevity, the difference between short-lived and long-lived teams, and how the life-span of a team affects performance and psychological safety.

Research shows that team longevity improves outcomes for the team, and that a significant part of this effect is the improvement of processes within the team over time. Teams that improve their processes over time also achieve greater levels of innovation. Team trust in management has been shown to improve significantly in longer-lived teams, and with a correlating positive impact on performance. The longer that a leader (or coach in this example) stays with the team, the better a team performs with that leader, however there appears to be a curvilinear effect where the improvement stalls or declines after 13 years.

Short lived vs long lived teams

I like to make the distinction between short-lived or “finite” teams, and long-lived or “indefinite” teams. Short-lived teams are designed to come together for a *thing* and break up again when the *thing* is completed. Examples of this are many flight crews, surgical teams, or project teams, brought together to deliver an end result, which then adjourn or disband. These teams are often aimed at effecting change, rather than creating and maintaining a product, or delivering a service. Or, they may be designed to hand over the product of their work to a different team who will support it. In any case, their life as a team is limited by the thing they’re asked to deliver. 

Indefinite teams may be product or service teams who own the product or service, or they may be a sports team, a “music team” (i.e. a band or orchestra), or a social team or group. These teams come together for as long as the organisation exists, the product or service exists, for as long as we want to be part of it, or for as long as we live. The majority of teams in organisations are indefinite, long-lived, teams, and people may be part of one or more finite and infinite teams. 

Tuckman’s Model

The most well-known model of team longevity is Tuckman’s Model, from Bruce Tuckman’s 1965 paper “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups“. In it, through data collected from therapy groups, he describes 5 stages of group development:

1. Forming: People get together and form a team. They get to know each other, form an informal social contract, and define the purpose of the group.
2. Storming: I like to think of this as “jostling for position” and working each other out. This is where conflict can arise, particularly if people are competing for roles. The future structure of the team is determined at this stage.
3. Norming: Members have reached consensus about formal and informal roles, tasks, priorities and behaviour and communication norms. It’s at this stage that “work” really begins, and muscle memory, skill, and team expertise builds through practice.
4. Performing: The team have optimised processes, built in feedback loops, and are now able to experiment with different approaches. I believe this stage is only possible within an environment of psychological safety – because without it, we cannot suggest ideas, identify areas for improvement, ask for help or admit mistakes.
5. Adjourning (added with Mary Ann Jensen in 1977): The team evaluates their success, celebrates, and ideally documents and records anything that future teams may need.

Here’s an illustration of it by the excellent Deisa Tremarias. I’ve added an extra loop back, to reflect the point that this is not a one-way path to “performing”. Teams may go through changes, shocks, and challenges that push them back into the storming phase, or even all the way to forming.
 

All models are wrong but some are useful, and Tuckman’s Model is wrong, but useful. Even Tuckman himself admitted in his 1965 paper: ‘This literature cannot be considered truly representative of small-group developmental processes’. The original study was conducted on a small set of groups, therapy groups to be precise, not groups in the workplace. Some studies have shown that Tuckman’s model often doesn’t reflect goal-oriented workplace teams, whilst other studies have demonstrated a good fit. 

storming – norming – performing or norming – storming – performing

We can make good use of Tuckman’s model though. No matter whether teams move through storming – norming – performing or norming – storming – performing or something else, the thing we know is that these stages can occur, and they take time. Tuckman suggested two aspects to group development: task activity and group structure. Both of these are conducive to performance, and related to psychological safety.

We can use this model to help us create long-lived, high performing teams, and work to mitigate the impact that limited lifespan has on a team, for example by using personal user manuals and team charters, to help improve team coordination and ease the flow through forming and storming phases. In fact, if we distinguish Tuckman’s “Task Activity” and “Group Structure“, we can suggest the below ideas as some practices to help teams reach the “performing” stage more rapidly:

Task Activity:

• Set the team goals, aims, and mission.
• From that, establish task priorities and desired outcomes. 
• Using OKRs or other approaches, ensure there is a strong link between tasks and the team’s desired outcome. If there is no link, or only a weak link, re-examine why we’re doing it.
• Reframe tasks as experiments.
• Define team measures of success and a shared Definition Of Done.
• Ensure success is rewarded.

Group Structure:

• Establish a shared social contract for the team to agree behaviour expectations and boundaries.
• Create Personal User Manuals for everyone in the team and share them.
• Ensure that team member roles are well defined.
• Create and evolve a Team Charter that defines who we are and what we do.
• Establish common practices and processes for working together and adapting to change (such as a new member joining).

It’s fair to say that psychological safety takes time to build, and we may assume that long-lived teams generally possess greater psychological safety if they’ve put in the work to build it. But there is a power in short-lived teams, in that the consequences of interpersonal risks can be reduced in knowing that the team is only temporary: if you mess up, at least you’ve only got to work with these folks for a little while longer!

Psychological Safety in the Workplace

“When women work remotely, they experience fewer microaggressions and higher levels of psychological safety.” This is a great research article from Lean In about Women in the Workplace – the state of women in corporate America. One of the key takeways is the dramatic (mostly positive) difference that remote and more flexible work has made for women in the workplace, who suffer fewer microaggressions and are more able to fit work around their lives. 

I love this piece in Forbes by Steve Denning, with Amy Edmondson. The focus of the piece highlights how shareholder value and high salaries have been the primary indicator of success for many firms, with financial targets the almost singular focus, which can make psychologically safe behaviours so difficult to embed. As Goldratt said, “Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave.“

This episode of Discovering Data with Loris Marini features Stephen Shedletztky talking about psychological safety. There are some interesting highlights about Boeing and aviation incidents in this episode, along with some nice points about those micro-behaviours and body language that we’ve highlighted in previous issues. Worth a listen.

Here’s a great little resource for educators and teachers: “A ‘How To’ Guide – behaviour that builds psychological safety in schools” from the folks at Education Support, resources for teachers, funded by the Welsh government.

This is incredible. Herbie Hancock describes how he played a wrong chord when performing live with Miles Davis, but Miles just paused, and then played some notes that made Herbie’s chord fit. He turned it into a new piece, and “turned poison into medicine.”
 

Things to do and try:

I love this from Letters of Note: a letter from C.S. Lewis, describing the three kinds of things that anyone ever needs to do, and if you find yourself doing something that doesn’t fit into one of these three types, maybe you should reconsider doing it. So, this week, see if you can find something that you could stop doing 🙂

“Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing one’s school work or being nice to people. Things one has got to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping. Things one likes doing—but of course I don’t know what you like. Perhaps you’ll write and tell me one day.”

This week’s poem:

Jenny Kiss’d Me, by Leigh Hunt, 1784–1859 

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.