You have been assigned to a team and you are excited about the prospect of working on a project with your coworkers.  You start attending meetings and in the first session you notice a few things that cause you some concern.  You sit in the meeting expecting a team agenda but everyone seems to have their own agenda.  You listen to the conversations, you even try to participate, but the discussions go absolutely nowhere.  At the end of the session you feel you just wasted your time because there are no solutions, no next steps or no actionable items.

Now the deadline for your project is approaching and you attended a number of meetings already.  Team members are still showing up to meetings with incomplete assignments.  There is no accountability at the meetings because there are no minutes taken or if minutes are being taken they are so long that no-one reads them.  In meetings, there is still no agenda and team members are still having unfocused discussions.  So what do you do?

Working in teams is usually a complex proposition because many times we are appointed to a team and we don’t collaborate on team and member expectations.  What we do is get caught in the trap of focusing on the project and not how we are going to get our team members to work together in a functional team environment.

Based on a team building model by Bruce Tuckman, teams should go through five typical stages of evolution in order to deliver results: Forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning.  The first stage is the formative or beginning stage where the team comes together as an entity.  This is usually followed by the storming stage where the team begins to form expectations, processes and roles.  The storming stage can be chaotic and teams sometimes try to achieve results without laying the groundwork that leads to norming. 

In building your team, be sure you are not lulled into thinking you are past the storming stage because the team members seem to be getting along well.  Sometimes team members have hidden, individual agendas and personal agendas range from a need for visibility to achieve a promotion, to sabotage. 

When you are building your team, the ideal is to move from storming into the norming stage where team processes and expectations are clearly defined for your team as a whole and for each member.   Here are a few tips to help you to move your team through the storming and norming stages to high performance:

1. Team members should be assigned roles like taking minutes or collating information between meetings.  Be sure the minutes are brief with clear action items listed, responsibilities assigned and deadlines set.

2. Team members should be held accountable for bringing completed assignments or updates to each meeting because team members are usually interdependent.  Be sure your update indicates there is some progress and if not, there should be an acceptable reason.

3. The leader or meeting facilitator should ensure there is role clarity, accountability and high performance by:
• Defining team objectives and member roles.  This can be done as a team for optimal buy-in.
• Planning for meetings by preparing an agenda
• Ensuring the team adheres to the agenda by effectively bringing conversations back to the objectives. 
• Determining if a digression can add to the quality of the discussion and nipping it if it doesn’t. 
• Effectively managing conflict among team members.  This can be done both during and between meetings.
• Keeping track of action items and ensuring there is follow up during and after each meeting.
• Managing meeting discussions, ensuring everyone has a fair opportunity to contribute.

Teams can function optimally when members trust each other and the process.  Integrating trust building as part of the team building equation can lead to higher levels of commitment, accountability and results so trust building is a useful exercise.  To achieve trust, it is important to be transparent, fair and open during the team building process.

If the team is stuck at the storming stage, measures should be taken to move the team beyond the stasis.  This may mean considering a change in leadership or having a candid discussion about the performance of the team with its members.  Once there is progress at the storming stage, the team has a good chance of successfully moving through the norming and performing stages.

Team building can be an intricate process riddled with subtle and obvious obstacles or it can be simple and seamless.  If a capable leader is at the helm, you can successfully identify and navigate the obstacles and move gracefully through the forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning stages achieving your desired results.