The 5 stages of team development are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman described the first four in 1965 and added the fifth in 1977. You'll also see the model called the stages of group development. Every team goes through the stages in order. What a leader controls is the pace, and that gap is what PowerProv is usually brought in to close.
- The 5 stages of team development are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning.
- Bruce Tuckman proposed the first four stages in 1965. Adjourning was added in 1977.
- The stages of team development are a sequence, not a schedule. Teams run through the same order at very different speeds.
- Storming can't be skipped. It can only be postponed, and postponed storming arrives attached to a real deadline.
- Norming is the shift from me to we. It comes from shared work, not from introductions.
- 98% of PowerProv participants report improved collaboration, measured before and after by the Personal Power Index™.
What are the 5 stages of team development?
The 5 stages of team development are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Bruce Tuckman set out the first four in his paper Developmental Sequence in Small Groups, published in Psychological Bulletin in 1965. He reviewed 50 studies of small groups and found they developed in a consistent order. Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen added adjourning in 1977.
| Stage | What it looks like | What the team needs |
|---|---|---|
| Forming | Polite, cautious, deferring to the leader. Nobody says what they think. | Clarity on purpose, roles and standards |
| Storming | Friction surfaces. Disagreement about approach, priority, or who decides. | Permission to disagree without cost |
| Norming | The team settles how it works. Trust and shared standards appear. | Shared work, not more meetings |
| Performing | Output without the leader refereeing. Problems get solved locally. | Room to run |
| Adjourning | The team disbands or reshapes. Mixed relief and loss. | Acknowledgement and a clean handover |
Tuckman wrote about groups, which is why the model is often called the stages of group development. Applied to a workplace team, the stages are the same. They sit inside the wider study of group dynamics.
One thing gets misread. The stages of team development aren't a timetable. Tuckman described a sequence, not a duration, and teams move through it at speeds that vary enormously.
Stage 1: What happens in the forming stage?
In the forming stage, a team is polite, cautious and looking to its leader for direction. People are working out what the job is and where they fit. Tuckman described this stage as orientation and testing.
What it looks like:
- Plenty of agreement and very little challenge
- Questions go to the leader, not to each other
- People describe their role, not their opinion
- Meetings feel smooth and decide very little
What the team needs from its leader: clarity. Say what the team is for, who decides what, and what good work looks like. A forming team can't argue productively about a goal nobody has stated. Write the standards down so nobody has to guess.
Forming feels pleasant, which is why leaders let it run too long. A team that's still this polite after two months hasn't bonded. It's waiting.
Stage 2: What happens in the storming stage?
In the storming stage, friction surfaces. People disagree about the approach, the priorities and who gets to decide. Storming is where a team works out whose judgement it trusts and how it handles disagreement. It's uncomfortable, and it's the stage that matters most.
What it looks like:
- Open disagreement about how the work should be done
- Pushback on decisions, including the leader's
- Frustration with pace, workload or unclear roles
- Small alliances forming inside the team
What the team needs from its leader: permission to disagree without paying for it. The leader's job in storming isn't to stop the argument. It's to keep it about the work and make sure it happens in the room.
Why do new teams stall in storming?
Because nobody wants to be first to say the awkward thing. In most new teams, the perceived cost of disagreeing out loud is high. You're new, you don't know how it lands, and the safe move is to nod and raise it later in a smaller room.
So the friction doesn't disappear. It goes underground and shows up as symptoms:
- Decisions that get made and then quietly relitigated
- Work redone because an objection surfaced after delivery
- Meetings that end in agreement and side channels that don't
- One or two people doing most of the talking while the rest wait
A team in this state can look calm and be badly stuck. No visible conflict in a new team usually means the disagreement hasn't found a safe route to the surface yet. Left alone, that quiet hardens into groupthink.
Can a team skip storming?
No. It can only postpone it, and the postponed version is worse.
A team that stays polite for six months hasn't avoided the stage. It has scheduled the stage for the first moment real pressure arrives, which is usually a deadline, a budget cut, or a project going sideways. Storming with a live crisis attached costs far more than storming in week three over something small.
A new team that argues productively in its first month is ahead, not behind.
“It was great to learn to be open and flexible and build on other people's ideas without giving up my own.”— Tim B., Creative Director
Stage 3: What happens in the norming stage?
In the norming stage, the team agrees how it works. Trust builds, roles settle, and people start backing each other's decisions. Norming is the shift from me to we: people stop protecting their own patch and start protecting the team's result.
What it looks like:
- People ask each other for help before they ask the leader
- Disagreements get raised early and resolved quickly
- The team has its own shorthand and its own standards
- Feedback travels sideways, not just down
What the team needs from its leader: shared work with real stakes. Introductions don't norm a team. Neither does a values session or a personality profile, though both have their uses. Teams norm around doing something together and finding out how each person operates under a bit of pressure.
Google's Project Aristotle research into team effectiveness found psychological safety was the strongest factor: the shared belief that the team is a safe place to take an interpersonal risk. Storming tests exactly that, and norming is what a team gets once it passes.
The practical moves that get a team there:
- Make standards explicit. New teams waste weeks guessing at norms nobody wrote down. Say how decisions get made, what "done" means, and how disagreement should be raised.
- Be wrong in public, deliberately. A leader who says "I got that call wrong" once in the first month does more for psychological safety than any statement of values.
- Create early shared work. Something with a real outcome, small enough to fail safely.
- Watch who isn't talking. Silence in a new team is data, not consent. PowerProv's work on psychological safety covers how to read and change it.
Stage 4: What does the performing stage look like?
In the performing stage, the team produces without the leader refereeing. People know their roles, trust each other's judgement and solve problems where they arise. The team's energy goes into the work, not into managing each other.
How you know your team is there:
- Decisions get made without being routed through you
- Disagreement is quick, direct and not personal
- People cover for each other without being asked
- A mistake gets fixed and learned from, not hidden or blamed
What the team needs from its leader: room to run. A performing team needs a leader who removes obstacles, keeps the goal clear and stays out of the detail. The common mistake here is stepping back in. A leader who keeps refereeing a team that no longer needs it pushes that team back towards dependence.
Performing isn't permanent. It holds for as long as the team's people and purpose stay stable.
Stage 5: What happens in the adjourning stage?
In the adjourning stage, the team finishes its work and disbands or reshapes. Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen added this fifth stage in 1977. It applies to project teams that end on a date, and to permanent teams that get restructured or merged.
What it looks like:
- Relief at finishing, mixed with a sense of loss
- Focus drifts as people look to their next role
- Loose ends get dropped in the handover
What the team needs from its leader: acknowledgement and a clean ending. Mark what the team achieved. Capture what worked so the next team doesn't start from zero. Hand over anything unfinished to a named person.
Leaders often skip adjourning because the work is done. The people aren't done. They carry how the last team ended into the next one they join.
Can a team go backwards through the stages?
Yes. Any real change to the team sends it back to an earlier stage. A team that loses two people, gains a new manager or absorbs another function returns to forming, whatever stage it had reached.
Going backwards isn't a failure. It's the model working as described. A performing team with a new leader has to re-establish who decides what, which is storming again. Teams that have been through the stages once usually move faster the second time, because they know disagreement is survivable.
The leader's job is to notice the reset and not assume last quarter's trust still applies.
What should a leader do in a new team's first 90 days?
Front-load the uncomfortable parts and stop trying to keep everyone comfortable. A rough sequence that works:
- Weeks 1–2: set the frame. Purpose, roles, decision rights, standards. Written down, not implied.
- Weeks 3–6: create friction on purpose. Put the team on a real problem where opinions will differ, and let the disagreement happen in the room.
- Weeks 6–10: name the norms the team has formed. Say out loud what you're seeing, including the unhelpful patterns. Naming a pattern is most of changing it.
- Weeks 10–13: step back. If the team still routes every decision through you at week 12, it hasn't normed. It has learned to ask you.
Leaders new to the role often find step two the hardest, because it feels like letting things go wrong. It isn't. Managers moving into their first leadership role are usually applying skills they already had, through other people's work instead of their own. That shift is where the discomfort comes from.
Do the stages of team development change for remote or merged teams?
Yes. In both cases the middle stage runs longer, for different reasons.
Remote and hybrid teams lose the small, low-stakes friction that lets storming surface gently. On video, disagreement is either a scheduled agenda item or nothing. Distributed teams generally need to create the shared experience that a shared floor would have produced.
Merged or restructured teams don't form once. They form on top of two existing sets of norms, each of which feels obviously correct to the people who hold it. Storming here is about whose way of working wins, which is why it takes longer and gets personal faster. PowerProv covers this case in its piece on team building after a merger.
How does experiential training shorten the timeline?
Experiential training gives a team the storming and norming experience in a few hours, without a real deliverable at risk.
That's why PowerProv gets booked for new, merged and restructured teams. A PowerProv workshop puts people into unfamiliar situations together where they have to think quickly, respond to each other, and get things wrong in front of colleagues. That's the storming experience in miniature, at a fraction of the cost of learning it live on a client project.
The mechanism underneath is what PowerProv calls the ensemble mindset. It's a "we, not me" way of working: you walk into work trusting that the people around you have your back, will support your decisions, will help make you look good, and will treat a mistake as something to learn from. That mindset is what a team is trying to build in norming. A PowerProv workshop is built to install it, which is why teams often say afterwards that they know each other properly, not just each other's names.
Two objections come up whenever this is proposed for a brand new team. The first is that it sounds like a comedy workshop. It isn't one, and nobody is asked to be funny or put in front of an audience. The second is more serious with a new group: you don't yet know who your quiet people are, and a forming team doesn't need an exercise that exposes someone in week two. Difficulty builds gradually and most of the work happens in small groups, so the quieter half of a new team tends to engage.
Teams of 10 or more can start with a half-day workshop, or use the six-week embedded class when a team is forming and the goal is to make the change hold.
PowerProv, Personal Power Index™
The Personal Power Index™ is PowerProv's ongoing longitudinal study, measuring a set of skills before and after each workshop across hundreds of participants. It measures capability change, not how much people enjoyed the day.
“Well suited to any organisation that wants to help their teams connect more, improve focus, active listening and have fun.”— Katrina M., People and Culture
Bottom line
- Five stages, one fixed order. Forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning. Leaders control the pace, not the sequence.
- A quiet new team is often a stuck one. No visible friction usually means the friction went underground.
- Norming is the move from me to we. It comes from shared work, not from introductions, values sessions or personality profiles.
- Rehearse the hard part. Experiential training gives a team the storming experience without a real deliverable at risk.
PowerProv runs workshops for teams of 10 or more across Australia and APAC, in person and online, rated 4.9 stars over 13 years with organisations including Google, Westpac, PwC, Canva and Bain & Co. Every workshop carries a money-back guarantee.
Book a discovery call to talk through where your team is stuck, or see how it works first.
Sources
- Developmental Sequence in Small Groups (1965) · Bruce W. Tuckman, Psychological Bulletin
- Guide: Understand Team Effectiveness (Project Aristotle) · Google re:Work
- Personal Power Index · PowerProv
Frequently asked questions
What are the 5 stages of team development?
The 5 stages of team development are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Forming is polite and tentative. Storming is where friction surfaces. Norming is where the team agrees how it works. Performing is where it produces without the leader refereeing. Adjourning is where the team wraps up or reshapes. Every team passes through them in that order.
What are Tuckman's stages of group development?
They're the same five stages under their original name. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman reviewed 50 published studies of small groups in 1965 and found they developed in a consistent order, which he called forming, storming, norming and performing. He wrote about groups in general. The model was later applied to workplace teams, which is why you'll see both names used.
What are the four stages of team development?
Forming, storming, norming and performing. Those four made up Bruce Tuckman's original 1965 model. In 1977 Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen added a fifth stage, adjourning, to cover what happens when a team finishes or disbands. Both versions are correct. The four-stage version describes a team's working life, and the five-stage version includes its ending.
How long does it take a new team to start performing?
There's no fixed timeline, and Tuckman never gave one. What's observable is that teams move at very different speeds through the same sequence, and the variable is rarely talent. Teams that surface disagreement early move faster than teams that stay polite, because polite teams postpone storming instead of avoiding it.
Can a team skip the storming stage?
No, and trying to is what creates the long version. Storming is the point where a team works out whose judgement it trusts and how it handles disagreement. A team that suppresses that discussion looks harmonious for a few months, then hits its first real deadline pressure and storms then, with a live problem attached.
Why do new teams get stuck in storming?
Usually because nobody feels safe being the first to disagree. When the cost of saying an unpopular thing feels high, the friction goes underground and doesn't get resolved. It resurfaces as slow decisions, side conversations and work being redone. The fix isn't conflict resolution training. It's making it normal to say the awkward thing early.
What should a leader do in a new team's first 90 days?
Three things. Make the standards explicit so people aren't guessing. Model being wrong in public at least once, which is the fastest way to lower the cost of disagreement for everyone else. And create shared work early, because teams norm around doing things together, not around meeting each other.
How can training speed up team development?
By compressing the experience. A team that has already worked through unfamiliar problems together, made mistakes in front of each other and recovered has effectively rehearsed storming and norming in a few hours. PowerProv workshops are built around that, and 98% of participants report improved collaboration afterwards according to the Personal Power Index™.
