A typical team goes through several stages before achieving a sense of shared equilibrium. One way to categorize these stages is forming, storming, norming, and performing.
How It Works
In the early stages, team members have to get to know each other. They learn about each other’s strengths and weaknesses and decide who they can work with and who might be a bit harder to trust. Then, they will experience some conflicts that create a temporary storm. People’s wills will be tested, conflicts resolved in one way or another, and all will agree to some common ground rules. Once the norms are established, team members can begin to settle into their work expectations. Over time, a team that works from those norms can perform more effectively. Disruption to the group’s performance will result from any change in the composition of the team.
What to Do to Encourage Great Team Performance
If you are trusted with leading a team, you will want to use appropriate measures to increase its performance over time. This requires an acute understanding of every member’s personality traits, professional strengths, and areas of weakness. A good team leader puts people in the right roles and gives them opportunities to work together on some aspects of a project. He or she also gives individuals the chance to pursue other tasks independently and report their progress back to the group. You should maintain a commitment to listening to issues from individuals and smaller groups within the team. Any team-wide issues should be addressed in a way that every member feels his or her voice was heard.
Try Team Building Times
Some teams never get to perform more effectively than the level they initially achieve after completing the stage of norming. One reason is because the team members do not get enough time to build and sustain meaningful connections between members. Another reason is that the vast majority of the team members never develop a sense of identity as belonging to a meaningful team.
Team leaders are challenged to give their team members frequent opportunities to develop shared goals and rules for operation. You can build better team performance by helping the team work through conflicts and adopt better forms of communication. If everyone is encouraged to participate at a level that challenges him or her personally, they have the potential to achieve a high degree of satisfaction from membership in the team. This can apply to both teams that form voluntarily and to teams that managers assign. It’s all in how you give your team the opportunity to grow and develop as a living, breathing organism.
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