How to Support Teams Through Their Stages of Development

Team Stage

How to Boost Team Effectiveness

At this stage, leaders need to clarify team purpose, mission, and goals for the team - as well as facilitating definition of team roles and responsibilities, as well as shared vision and values, with everyone’s input. Invite leaders to conduct 1:1 meetings with all team members to find out their personal goals and interests to ensure they will be met, at least in part, during the course of the team’s work.

Leaders may be tempted to jump into the work with their team, so help them plan and conduct chartering and team building exercises at this phase. Help them see that this is an investment in effective teaming that will pay off later, and have specific examples handy of what impact this has had for other leaders and teams you’ve worked with.

At this stage, leaders need to help the team address conflict as it arises, working through interpersonal problems so that team members function both independently and together as a team and settle into their roles and responsibilities.

Leaders often need coaching to strengthen their discussion-leading skills. They need to learn to help teams discuss, foster acceptance of, and negotiate each team member’s needs as conflict arises - ensuring members respect differences in perspective, and focus on team goals above their own. You may need to support leaders to coach some team members to be more assertive and others to be more effective listeners during this time. Leaders may also need to limit the degree of decision-making autonomy and independence on the team until they begin to work together more smoothly.

At this stage, support leaders in clarifying and applying “rules of engagement” on the team - the processes and procedures for how the team plans, makes decisions, handles conflict, uses meeting time, and communicates and shares information. Leaders may need help in noticing when team norms get violated, drawing members attention to this, and inviting them to apply these norms consistently. They may also need help to strengthen approaches that help the team value the differences in perspective that emerge - to show how this leads to improved decision-making.

Invite the leader to encourage members to help each other and the team as a whole, rather than focus exclusively on their own functional issues. Keeping team members motivated with first results, indicating they are on track, will help encourage them to move to the performing stage.

Coach leaders to stay focused on team self-evaluation - determining how the team is regularly assessing how it’s performing. At this stage, leaders need to keep the team motivated by recognizing and rewarding the emerging gains in team performance, productivity, collaboration, and achievement. Support leaders in empowering the team to self-manage changes to their own processes without leader involvement, honing decision-making and problem-solving processes. At this stage, invite leaders to delegate much of your work and concentrate more fully on developing team members through mentoring and coaching.

Help leaders at this stage to stay vigilant for signs of stagnation, disengagement, or process inefficiency on the team, and share these observations with the team to boost self-awareness. Coach leaders to get curious, inviting team members to add their own observations, diagnose what’s going on, and clarify what actions they want to take as a result.

For time-limited team engagements, the team’s work will eventually come to an end. Leaders may be tempted to move on at this point. Invite them to dedicate time to fully celebrate the team’s accomplishments, and capture learnings (both in terms of the work itself and the collaboration) that contributed to them.

For teams with ongoing mandates, there will eventually be a need for the team to self-transform. When team composition changes, or a major challenge emerges that will require new skills or capacities from the team, leaders may jump into the work once again. Invite them to plan a strategic offsite meeting to re-launch the team. Help them to use it an opportunity to lead the team through the forming stage and invite members to recommit to capitalizing on the big, new, and time-limited opportunity. A sense of urgency and excitement is something all great team leaders instill at this stage.