How a 50 year old team model directs your startup’s performance

Most people use a 50-year-old model to talk about the team. You’re probably familiar with it.

In 1965, Bruce Tuckman described a model of team development with four simple stages:

• forming

• storming

• norming

• performing

In the five and a half decades since, no one has improved upon it for immediate recognition and recall. It’s the standard through which we discuss and analyze teams.

You can also use it to predict a startup team’s trajectory.

What do the four stages mean?

Tuckman’s model is immediately recognizable for just about any team:

In the forming stage, the teams members come together around a common purpose and work out what it is they are doing together. Enthusiasm and morale tend to be high here.

The storming stage implies conflict and tension as the team begins to disagree with and challenge their members. This is the process by which a team finds real alignment on its goals and priorities as well as its roles and responsibilities.

As the team works out its conflicts, it moves into the calmer norming stage, in which the agreements reached in the storming stage become a part of normal work. This is when the team settles into who it is and how it works.

Once these basics are established for a team, they can move into the performing stage, acting more confidently through greater alignment. This stage is a prerequisite for scale.

Not all teams will move through all of Tuckman’s stages—some just don’t make it through storming—but teams that perform will experience them at least once and likely many times.

My (misplaced) misgivings about the four stages

Confession: it took me a long time to trust Tuckman’s model. Here’s why: I’m deeply skeptical of models that rhyme or use alliteration (e.g. the three C’s of whatever). Anything that sounds too clever probably doesn’t have much substance (that was my thinking, at least). The fact that forming, storming, performing, and norming rhyme so naturally me to suspect that something must be missing. How could something supposedly useful also be so neat and tidy?

My cynicism was misplaced. Most people default to those four stages as their way of understanding teams. Whether I like it or not, Tuchman gave people a language through which to think about and talk about teams. The model discusses the entire lifecycle of a team, and everything we need to understand in a growing company– culture, politics, conflict, hiring, firing—it’s all in there. Rather than dismiss the model because it’s so clever, decided embrace what people already intuitively understand. Just because something is 50 years old and rhymes doesn’t mean it isn’t useful today. In fact, that may be why it’s useful for one kind of team in particular.

The four stages matter more in a startup

Those four stages are more relevant to a startup team than any other type of team. This is because of the pace and stakes for a startup team.

In a large, mature company, teams form and dissolve around projects and initiatives. People on a team often have the choice to wait out any team experience they don’t like, knowing that they’ll be on other teams soon enough. This even happens in corporate executive teams, where the average tenure for C level positions can be breathtakingly brief. Top execs tend get promoted, rotated, and fired regularly. The players change, but the game persists.

Startup teams are different. When they come together, it is often for the life of the company—even beyond. The company starts at approximately the same time the team does, and the team guides the company through its most significant stages. Startup teams and their companies often are interchangeable. Up to a point, the team is the company.

Everything a company does from customer acquisition to product development to fund raising is driven by the health and dynamics of its founding team. Let me say that differently:

Your team is the source of the company’s performance.

Healthy team, good decisions and performance. Dysfunctional team, wobbly outcomes.

Those dynamics follow predictable patterns in each of the four stages. Any team that confronts a problem and blames external factors is looking in the wrong place. Most challenges in a startup have a root cause (and a solution) within the team itself. The four stages tend to tell you where to look for those root causes—and how to fix them.

The four stages tell you where to find performance

When you identify and address team problems quickly, you get better decisions and momentum toward higher performance. When you let those problems persist, they have tangible costs.

Avoiding conflict? This means that the team isn’t discussing issues in an honest way (and likely getting stalled in early storming). Its members are withholding their skills and opinions, often to the detriment of the company, preventing true alignment. A team that can’t talk about what matters also can’t do much about what matters.

Unhealthy conflict in a team (mid-storming)? Not only is this another way not to discuss what really matters, it is also a way to ensure that you never will be able have those conversations. If you can’t argue civilly and professionally, what hope you have to win people over to your point of view? If you think your colleagues are idiots, unhealthy conflict is damaging to the company, to the team, and the people who dish it out and take it.

Having the same discussion over and over in a meeting (mid- to late-storming—often right before a resolution)? Every meeting has a direct cost and an indirect cost direct costs is how much you’re paying the people in that room to be in that room, and how much you’re paying for the room. During my corporate career, I had access to compensation benefit information for all of my employees. I would often take the hourly cost of each of the people in the room and multiply it by the number of hours we were planning to be together. Then, at the beginning of the meeting, I would announce, this meeting will cost us X thousands of dollars. Let’s make sure it’s worth it. This is a great way to put the teams time in context.

There are also indirect costs when a team meets (all stages), and every meeting to rehash an old debate without a decision compounds that cost. Indirect indirect costs are some obvious things: the work could be doing if they weren’t in that room together; the customers the team could be talking with if they weren’t talking to each other; and all of the improvements to products, services, relationships, and external support the teams need to be doing anyway.

There are also non-obvious indirect costs like the opportunity cost of not being able to seize business opportunities because the decision is resolved, top talent that isn’t being hired because the team isn’t certain what it needs, and the hits to morale and cooperation that come about when a team has lost his way. Taken together, the direct and indirect costs of unnecessary meetings that don’t break new ground or yield new decisions can be stunning.

How I learned to stop worrying and love Tuckman

How the team performs is how the company performs. Given the choice, many founders might not work with a team at all, but high-performing teams are a necessity for any company that wants to scale. There’s almost no idea that couldn’t be improved or expanded through the involvement of talented people who know how to work together effectively and respectfully. If your company is ever going to reach its potential, you are going to need other people. The degree to which you can work effectively with those people is the degree to which you are going to succeed in your chosen market.

Tuckman’s model may sound hokey or cheesy, but it describes the end to end lifecycle of working effectively with other people. It contemplates how teams come together, why they exist in the first place, how they resolve conflicts, how they create culture, how they engage with politics, and how they perform and grow. As much as I hate a cliché, I love instant recognition.

In the last 50 years, no one has improved upon Tuckman’s model for instant recognition.