The 5 Stages of Good Teams

Gina Abudi is the President of Abudi Consulting Group and a blogger at GinaAbudi.com. She works with Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 organizations in the areas of leadership, project management and process improvement. Gina's book "Best Practices for Managing BPI Projects: Six Steps to Success" will be published by J Ross Publishing on March 15, 2015. Gina is a professional speaker and member of the Global Speaker's Federation. She speaks on the same topics in which she consults and offers training workshops.

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Every high-performing team progresses through five stages of development. Project leaders must understand these stages to help teams realize their full potential as they work toward common goals. Here’s an overview of the five stages and what to look out for along the way.

The first four stages of team growth were first developed by Bruce Wayne Tuckman and published in 1965.  His theory — called “Tuckman’s Stages” — was based on research he conducted on team dynamics.  He believed (as is a common belief today) that these stages are inevitable in order for a team to grow to the point where they are functioning effectively together and delivering high quality results.

In 1977, Tuckman, jointly with Mary Ann Jensen, added a fifth stage: “Adjourning.” The adjourning stage is when the team is completing the current project. They will be joining other teams and moving on to other work in the near future. For a high performing team, the end of a project brings on feelings of sadness as the team members have effectively become as one and now are going their separate ways.

This article describes the five stages of team development. A second article, coming next week, will present a case study of a team progressing through the five stages.

Stage 1: Forming — The “forming” stage takes place when the team…

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