Storming Stage of Team Development
Storming is the second stage of team development and this stage is characterized by a bid for power and inter-personal conflicts. Learn the key factors that occur in the storming stage and the strategies that a team leader can adopt to pass this stage of high winds
Managing Team Conflicts in the Storming Stage
Storming is the second stage of team development and in this stage, members start competing for status, leadership, and control in the group. When group members get to know each other better, the storming stage begins. This stage is characterized by a bid for power. Every team will move through this phase. Some will stay here longer than others. During the Storming stage, conflicts arise as team members try to figure out their roles and delegate tasks. This stage can be difficult, but it can also be highly productive.
Characteristics of the Storming Stage:
Key factors that occur in the storming stage for the team members might include:
- Individuals understand others' behavior and assert their role in the group.
- Team members may compete for a certain role or position on the team.
- The leader’s authority may be challenged as others compete for the position.
- As a result inter-personal conflict starts.
- Members try to resolve the issues related to the task and working relations.
- They also resolve the issues related to the role of the individual in the group.
- Roles and responsibilities get clarified to a certain extent.
- The rules and ways of working as a team start to be defined.
- The team still lacks established processes.
- The team lacks strong interrelationships with their colleagues.
- Some members may feel overwhelmed by how much there is to do.
- Some members may also feel uncomfortable with the approach being used.
- Some may even start questioning the appropriateness of the goals of the team.
- Some may start resisting taking on tasks.
- Members will begin to open up but also confront each other on ideas.
- Can be painful to team members who are reluctant to deal with conflict.
- Politeness tends to begin to wear off and dissension can occur over.
- Control often becomes the primary issue.
- Disagreements can be either very obvious or subtle.
- Sharp fluctuations in attitude about the team and the project's chance of success.
- Arguing among members even when they agree on the real issues.
Managing Conflict during Storming:
As team members struggle over roles and responsibilities, conflict can arise. But it can also be a highly creative stage as ideas are generated and challenged, and important issues are discussed. Identify what some of the problems are they will need to solve. If they're to move to the next stage, team members must learn to voice disagreement openly and constructively while staying focused on common objectives and areas of agreement. During the Storming stage, to help team development, you should focus on team building to ensure that people can get to know one another and not get stuck in seeing each other as competitors.
Suggestions for the Team Lead/Member in this stage:
To make sure that Storming results in positive growth, the team leader needs to:
- Establish process and structure
- Ensure that everyone stays on track with the team's goal, and
- Help the team define a shared vision
- Work to smooth conflict and build good relationships between team members.
- Allow and encourage productive conflict.
- Need to remain professional and objective.
- Allow each member to share their ideas or ask for input.
- Be open to every team member's input
- Help members to understand and appreciate the other members’ knowledge and skills.
- Generally provide support, especially to those team members who are less secure.
- Remain positive and firm in the face of challenges to your leadership or the team's goal.
- Perhaps explain the phases of team development so that people understand why conflict's occurring, and understand that things will get better in the future.
- Compliment team members.
- Review team goals and ground rules
- Address problem behaviors
- Check processes regularly
- Assure the team of progress
- Apply conflict management techniques
Every team will move through this phase. Storming is the most difficult stage for a team to weather, and this is the stage when many teams fail. Some teams may stay here longer than others. Storming is necessary for healthy team development. When team members begin to trust one another enough to air differences, this signals readiness to work things out.
Related Links
You May Also Like
-
Effective Business Communication
Communication is all about getting the message across correctly. To make this happen, you need to have good speaking skills and good writing skills. If you have these skills coupled with good listening skills and interest in reading, you have all the potential to be a good communicator. What things should the leader take into consideration to be more effective with interpersonal communication?
-
All the teams are dynamic in nature and they take time to come together, they form, develop, and grow in stages, over a period of time. Teams go through five progressive stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning. In this article, we want to introduce you to these stages of team development and certain strategies that you can use to help the team grow and develop in each of these stages.
-
Collaborative leadership is all about collaborative problem-solving and decision-making or can also be defined as the leadership of a collaborative effort. . The term started to appear in the mid-1990s in response to the formation of long term public-private partnerships to rebuild public infrastructure. Learn how you can use principles of collaborative leadership to enhance your leadership skills for being an effective leader.
-
How often do you have a plan for how you are going to spend your day but you aren't able to complete the tasks on your plan because of unimportant tasks, interruptions, or your own procrastination? Wouldn't it be great to be able to manage your schedule and your time while avoiding, or at least controlling, these time stealers? Learn the strategies to manage your schedule while still handling interruptions and demands on your time.
-
Appreciative leaders encourage contributions from those around them and facilitate the discussion to mutually solve problems. Understand the concept of Appreciative Leadership and learn about tools to create and ask powerful questions - that lead to new discoveries and possibilities. Instead of focusing on what’s wrong in the workplace, learn about, and build upon what works. Learn in this article the art to apply appreciative inquiry to specific situations and challenges at your workplace.
-
In its simplest sense, decision-making is the act of choosing between two or more courses of action. Decision making is a key skill in the workplace and is particularly important if you want to be an effective leader. When decisions have to be made, there are several stages that you should go through to reach a practical solution. Understand the meaning and importance of decision making and how to look at it as a process.
-
A good leadership style is something that every effective leader must have in order to succeed, but identifying what that entails or does not entails might be difficult to understand. Most of the research on leadership focuses on the exemplary, best practices, and positive attributes of effective and successful leaders. This article talks about a new approach to learn leadership using lessons from bad leadership. That is the lessons to be learned by examining leaders who have not effectively exercised their power, authority, or influence.
-
Recognizing Stress & its Sources
As an individual, you almost certainly know what stress feels like. Stressors are events or situations to which people must adjust. Stressors may be physical or psychological in nature. The level of severity of stress is determined not merely by exposure but the intensity, duration, and frequency of stressors. The sources of stress are many. They arise from multiple areas both with the individual and from the environment.
-
Laissez-faire is a style of leadership that affords the group members a great deal of independence. Tasks are delegated to the group members and they are responsible to see the project through to fruition. Research has shown that this style of leadership leads to the lowest levels of productivity. This article explains this style and covers the implications of having a hands-off approach and the situations where this style could be effective.
-
The development of teams is an ongoing process because the composition of the team may keep on changing. The new members may join and the old members may leave the team. The team members pass through several stages for the development of the team and there has been a lot of research to identify these stages. In this article, we discuss the common theories of team development.
