Forming Stages: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Forming Stages, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
About 1 minute
Try it here: which stage is your team in?
Name the stage before you choose how to lead. Friction in a new team is often a normal stage, not a people problem.
Which stage does my team seem to be in?
Practices that may help
- Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
Bruce Tuckman’s model describes four stages every team moves through — Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing — before optionally Adjourning. The stages are a useful diagnostic map for leaders: friction in a new team is usually normal Storming, not a personnel problem. - Diagnose which stage your team is in
Name the stage you’re in before you pick a leadership response.
Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development - Iterate — treat the stages as a loop, not a line
Cycle back to earlier stages as testing reveals you framed the wrong problem.
Design Thinking, Step by Step - The Transtheoretical Model of Change, Made Practical
The Transtheoretical Model (TTM), developed by Prochaska and DiClemente, proposes that behavior change moves through five stages — precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance — and that strategies effective in one stage often backfire in another. The staging framework is well-validated; the prescriptive matching of "stage-tailored" interventions shows promising but mixed results in trials. - Forming: provide clarity before connection
In the first stage, a new team needs structure and purpose more than it needs team-building.
Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development - The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
Timothy Clark’s four-stage model holds that psychological safety develops in a predictable sequence: people first need to feel included, then safe to learn (make mistakes), then to contribute ideas, then to challenge the status quo. Skipping stages or pushing for challenger safety before inclusion is established typically backfires. The model is a practitioner framework grounded in Clark’s organizational consulting work and Edmondson’s foundational research. - Design Thinking, Step by Step
Design thinking is a five-stage problem-solving framework — empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test — popularized by IDEO and the Stanford d.school. It is a process model, not a tested intervention: its value comes from forcing you to understand the user before you commit to a solution, and to learn cheaply through prototypes instead of expensive bets. - Systematically fade the scaffold as competence grows
Plan from the start how support will be withdrawn, and execute that plan deliberately.
Scaffolding: The Art of Temporary Learning Support - Norming: codify agreements in writing
What the team has figured out informally needs to become explicit so it survives personnel changes.
Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development - Scaffolding: The Art of Temporary Learning Support
Scaffolding, a term introduced by Jerome Bruner’s research team to describe Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development in practice, is a set of temporary supports that allow a learner to perform tasks just beyond current ability — with the explicit goal of withdrawing those supports as the learner becomes capable. The evidence across educational settings is strong and consistent.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- My team feels off and I keep reacting to each flare-up as its own thing, but I can’t actually say what phase we’re in
- I treated the whole thing like a checklist and shipped the first version because I’d "finished the steps"
- I just took over a brand-new team and everyone’s being polite and looking to me for everything
- The supports I leaned on while learning have quietly become permanent crutches
- My team has finally figured out how to work together, but it all lives in everyone’s heads
Related concerns
- Five Stages Of Group
Bruce Tuckman’s model describes four stages every team moves through — Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing — before optionally Adjourning. The stages are a useful diagnostic map for leaders: friction in a new team is usually normal Storming, not a personnel problem.
- Norming Stages
What the team has figured out informally needs to become explicit so it survives personnel changes.
Norming: codify agreements in writing
- Stages Of Group Development
Bruce Tuckman’s model describes four stages every team moves through — Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing — before optionally Adjourning. The stages are a useful diagnostic map for leaders: friction in a new team is usually normal Storming, not a personnel problem.
- Storming Norming Performing Stages
Bruce Tuckman’s model describes four stages every team moves through — Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing — before optionally Adjourning. The stages are a useful diagnostic map for leaders: friction in a new team is usually normal Storming, not a personnel problem.
- Team Development Stages Tuckman
Bruce Tuckman’s model describes four stages every team moves through — Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing — before optionally Adjourning. The stages are a useful diagnostic map for leaders: friction in a new team is usually normal Storming, not a personnel problem.
- Tuckman S Stages Of Team Development At Work
Bruce Tuckman’s model describes four stages every team moves through — Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing — before optionally Adjourning. The stages are a useful diagnostic map for leaders: friction in a new team is usually normal Storming, not a personnel problem.
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