NORMING & PERFORMING

Continuing from my previous post, after the first two stages of team development, the third stage is called NORMING – the time when the team is actively working together.

During the norming stage, most teams have achieved an open climate where team members express emotions constructively, willingly and confidently contribute to the team, and demonstrate caring attitudes about the team and organization. In this third stage team members are consciously skilled. They operate as a team, but it still requires conscious effort and concentration for the team to function well.

Team members have learned to:

·      Accept team roles, goals, ground rules, and processes.

·      Follow firmly established standard procedures.

·      Reach group decisions with greater ease.

·      Perform their roles mostly with independence.

During NORMING, leaders work to facilitate team growth, serving them by:

·      Involving team members in decisions that affect their roles.

·      Holding regular team meetings and encouraging socialization.

·      Listening to team members’ problems and concerns, helping them resolve issues.

·      Helping team members develop their abilities and skills.

·      Recognizing positive outcomes, rewarding team spirit and progress on goals.

How would a leader demonstrate servant leadership during norming? Servant leadership plays a critical role in this stage. A leader equips team members to get the job done, building their independence and confidence to handle responsibilities and decision-making. It can be likened to teaching a teenager to drive. The young man received his driver’s permit and, with your supervision, is doing the work on his own with your guidance beside him. He is making decisions on his own while you are attentive to process more complex choices cooperatively. The goal is to produce skillful, knowledgeable independence of team members, which results from a leader’s intentional presence, observation, feedback, discussion, and modeling as a repetitive cycle until independence with excellence is achieved. Pair that with facilitating the cooperation between team members to function as a separate but unified group of achievers.

The final stage of team development is performing – the time when the team is fully functional as individual members and in collaboration with other team members.

The team is now acting as one unit. Roles have been defined, boundaries and parameters are clear, and everyone is working together with seeming effortlessness. During this fourth stage, team members are unconsciously skilled. Consequently, team members comfortably reveal their true selves and self-identify as an integral member of the team.

In the performing stage, leaders need to empower the team to act more independently through:

·      Delegating more responsibility and authority to take responsibilities and lead projects.

·      Expecting team members to find and correct their own errors and improve their processes.

·      Providing feedback to the team members with relevant results and “big picture” updates.

·      Allowing team members to be creative and take calculated risks.

When teams are PERFORMING, they need leaders to VALIDATE the job that the team is doing.

Part of a leader’s role during this stage is to affirm the value of the work the team members are producing. Having achieved greater knowledge, skills, output, and fruitfulness, a team still needs to be motivated. Leaders can invite team members to reflect on the significance of their roles, reminding them of what has been achieved corporately, incentivizing performance effort, and affirming leadership potential. This can be a fun phase of team development. You want to end up here through your intentional leadership coaching, helping individuals to become greater performers, building a team that can carry itself. It takes time but is well worth your effort!

What stage do you think your team is in and why?