Storming Norming Forming Performing (Tuckman's Model)

If you've ever led a team and thought, why are we suddenly arguing about everything? Or why does this group feel stuck even though everyone is talented? There's a simple framework that actually explains a lot of it. Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ and the New York Times bestselling author of books like Hiring for Attitude, Managing Narcissists and Blamers, and my newest groundbreaking book on teams called Team Players: The 5 Critical Roles You Need to Build a Winning Team. Now, the framework I want to teach you today is called Tuckman's Stages of Group Development. You'll usually hear it as forming, storming, norming, performing, and later adjourning. And here's the big idea. Teams don't start out effective. They grow into it. So the problems you're seeing might not be a bad team. They might be a normal stage. Let me walk you through what each stage looks like, what leaders often do wrong in that stage, and a few surprising caveats that most people leave out. First is forming. Forming is the nice phase. People are polite. They're careful. They're trying to figure out who's in charge, what's expected of me, what kind of group is this. A lot of leaders misread forming as alignment. It's not alignment. It's uncertainty with good manners. In forming, your team needs clarity more than inspiration. They need to know, what are we doing here? Why does it matter? How are we going to work together? And how will decisions actually get made? If you don't give structure here, the team doesn't magically become self-directed. They just become confused quietly. Then comes storming. Storming is where most leaders panic because it feels like the team is breaking. But in this model, storming isn't failure. It's development. Storming is when people stop performing politeness and start showing reality, real opinions, real preferences, real working styles. Real frustration. It can look like open conflict, arguments, pushback, side conversations, cliques, or it can look quieter. Passive resistance, missed deadlines, people checking out, sarcasm, "Yeah, sure," in meetings and complaining later. The core of storming is this: people are fighting over 3 things: goals, roles, and control. What are we really trying to accomplish? Who owns what? Who gets to decide? And here's a leadership truth that's uncomfortable. If you shut down storming too hard, you don't create harmony. You create fake harmony. You get a team that looks calm but never truly commits. In storming, your job isn't to eliminate conflict. Your job is to keep conflict from turning personal and to turn it into clarity. You're coaching the team to disagree about ideas without attacking people. You're reclarifying roles and decision rules, and you're constantly pulling people back to the shared mission because that shared mission is what keeps storming from becoming a permanent civil war. By the way, if your team struggles to make fast decisions, spread the work evenly, or have disagreements that actually lead somewhere, my latest book, Team Players, will show you exactly why and what to do about it. It breaks down the 5 critical roles winning teams have and how to spot what's missing when a team gets stuck. Now, if the team works through storming instead of getting trapped in it, you move into norming. Norming is when the team starts to feel like an actual team. People stop trying to win every discussion and start trying to win together. They develop norms, sometimes written, usually unwritten, about how they communicate, how they solve problems, how fast they respond, what good work looks like, and what gets escalated and what gets handled inside the team. Morale improves, collaboration improves. You'll hear more we language. In forming, you're more directive. In storming, you're more of a coach, a mediator. In norming, you start stepping back. You reinforce what's working and let the team carry more responsibility. But here's a surprising warning. Norming can create its own trap. When the team finally gets along, sometimes they protect harmony so much that they stop challenging each other. They avoid uncomfortable truths. They stop debating. And that's where groupthink can creep in. So in norming, you want cohesion, but you also want candor. You want trust, but you also want constructive friction. Then there's performing. This is the payoff stage. Performing is where the team becomes productive in a way that feels almost effortless. People know the mission. They know their roles. They trust each other. They handle disagreements quickly. Decisions don't take forever. Work— moves. And you see a different kind of behavior here— flexibility. In a performing team, people don't say, "That's not my job." They say, "What do we need right now?" They adjust, they support, they fill gaps without drama. And again, your leadership posture changes. In performing, if you micromanage, you actually slow them down. Your job is to remove obstacles, protect the team from unnecessary outside interference, and Keep the team resourced and aligned with stakeholders. Quick side note, this is exactly why I wrote Team Players, because most leaders are taught to focus on chemistry and trust, but the teams that consistently win aren't just close. They have the right mix of roles so decisions don't bottleneck, work doesn't pile on to one or two people, and conflict turns into progress instead of gridlock. If that sounds like a familiar pain point, Team Players is built for you. Now, the stage that most leaders forget is adjourning. Tuckman's original model had 4 stages, but later work added adjourning to describe what happens when a team finishes its mission and breaks apart. This matters a lot more than people think. Teams don't just complete projects. People complete relationships and identities, especially if the team was high-performing. There can be pride and relief and also a real sense of loss. So adjourning is about closure, finishing deliverables, capturing lessons learned, celebrating the win, and making sure people aren't left hanging about what's next. Now, let me give you the surprising stuff that makes this model way more useful and also keeps you from overusing it. First, teams don't always move through these stages in a clean, straight line. A team can be performing and then suddenly go right back into storming if something major changes. New leader, new team member, scope change, crisis, reorg, you name it. So if your great team suddenly feels messy again, don't assume the culture broke. You might just be watching a regression that needs reforming and renorming. Second, not every team shows every stage clearly. Some teams don't have a dramatic storming phase the way the internet describes it. Conflict might be mild, short, or, you know, expressed in much subtler ways. So don't go hunting for drama just because a model says storming. Use the model as a diagnostic lens instead. Ask, where are we unclear? Where are we stuck? Are we still polite and uncertain? Are we fighting about roles? And are we aligning on norms? Are we executing smoothly? Third, time and deadlines matter more than this Particular model admits a lot of teams look calm early on, then hit a midpoint wake-up call, reorganize fast, and, you know, sprint toward the deadline. So if you're leading project teams, you'll often see a big shift when the timeline becomes real. That's not weird. That's human. And last, the model's biggest strength is also its weakness. It's simple. It's memorable. It gives teams a common language. But, but it can also turn into a lazy explanation like, oh, we're storming, so it's fine, while nothing changes. The point isn't to label the stage. The point is to lead what the stage requires. So here's a practical way to use this without turning it into a poster on the wall. If your team is new, ask, have I given enough clarity? That's forming leadership. If your team is tense, ask, are Are we fighting about goals, roles, or control? Then fix those. Don't just ask people to be nicer. That's storming leadership. If your team is calm but slow, ask, do we have real norms and real accountability or just politeness? That's norming leadership. And if your team is high-performing, ask, am I protecting this team's momentum or accidentally disrupting it? That's performing leadership. And when a team finishes, ask, did we capture what we learned? And did we give people closure? That's adjourning leadership. Leadership. Because the real gift of Tuckman's stages isn't that it describes teams. It's that it's, it normalizes what you're experiencing and gives you a smarter response than either panicking or ignoring it. So listen, if your team feels messy right now, don't assume you're doomed. You might just be exactly where growing teams are supposed to be. If this was helpful, hit like, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next episode. And if you want more leadership tools you can use immediately— quizzes, research, courses, and a whole lot more— head over to leadershipiq.com. I'm Mark Murphy. I'll see you next time.