Coaching practices for Forming Storming Norming Performing

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Forming Storming Norming Performing, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • We had a reorg — lost a key person, changed direction — and suddenly the team that used to hum is fighting and second-guessing again, and I’m treating it like they broke instead of seeing the ground shifted under them.
  • 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
  • There’s real friction on my team
  • My team has finally figured out how to work together, but it all lives in everyone’s heads
  • I just took over a brand-new team and everyone’s being polite and looking to me for everything

Practices that may help

  1. 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.
  2. Recognize and recover from stage regression
    A team that was Performing can drop back to Storming — and the recovery move is different from the original ascent.
    Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
  3. 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
  4. Storming: name the conflict without taking sides
    Surface the tension that’s already there rather than managing it away.
    Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. Performing: step back and protect the conditions
    A Performing team needs air cover and resources, not direction.
    Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
  8. Assign project phases to genius-matched people
    Route early ideation to Wonder/Invention geniuses and execution phases to Tenacity geniuses.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  9. Blue hat: manage the thinking process itself
    Step back from the content to manage which hat is needed next — the blue hat is the meta-thinking conductor.
    Six Thinking Hats, Made Practical
  10. Expand the IZOF profile to include positive and negative emotions
    Map which emotions — not just anxiety — are functional for your performance, and which are dysfunctional.
    The Zone of Optimal Functioning: Hanin’s IZOF Model

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