More Lessons from Tuckman

Reason 3 -It doesn’t actually shift the dial

My biggest issue with Tuckman’s model is that it tells a story but it doesn’t tell you what to do. It doesn’t actually help leaders improve the way their teams work. To be fair to Tuckman, he recognised this. He was quite clear in admitting his model was never meant to be used to improve team working, only to describe a potential path that he found therapeutic teams went through, which he felt back in 1965, could also be applied to workplace teams.

So if Tuckman’s model was not constructed for the work place, is out of date and doesn’t actually?help?leaders improve their teams – why are we still using it? It gets over 50,000 hits a week on Google! With this obsession is it any wonder why our teams are anything other than mediocre? To build teams fit for today we have to be far less lazy, much more discerning, apply better scientific thinking and be more rigorous in how we apply our considerable knowledge.

Is there a sequence that actually works though? Our research tells us there is a valid sequence of three stages we can confidently go through to effectively build today’s teams.

Step 1 – Get the Team on the Same Page

Forming makes eminent sense, but Tuckman didn’t cover half of it.?For a start forming actually includes norming, the agreement to work in a certain way, with certain ground rules and to honour certain principles. Agreeing our target norms is part of the process of quickly establishing same page trust – a form of cognitive based trust that can be acquired much quicker than emotional based trust or the trust we accrue with someone because they are kind and supportive of us. The extreme teams found in the military or emergency services get this spot on. They don’t care whether the helicopter pilot is a kind person. They just want to be sure they can do their job and are on the same page when it comes to the mission and the plan. Extreme teams assume trust but they also rapidly establish commonality of purpose, goals, roles, plans and feedback mechanisms. Let’s face it today’s teams are increasingly becoming more extreme. Digitalisation means VUCA working. So contrary to what other well -known team building models proclaim, getting on the same page rather than building vulnerability based trust is actually the place to start building the high performing modern workplace team.