Recently, I read Tuckman Was Wrong by Doc Norton. It’s an old piece (yes, 2017 is old now).
The article talks about how teams don’t go from one stage to another in the order Tuckman defined: forming, storming, norming, and performing. The research that’s been done over 50 years showed that teams instead jump from one stage to another, not in any particular order, skip one stage entirely, or consistently show elements of one stage, and are much more dynamic; sometimes, it’s even impossible to tell which stage the team is in. Then Doc talks about team stability and the power of fluidity.
I am one of the Tuckmanites in terms of using team stages as a tool, and I always leaned toward stable teams as a software engineer (although I must admit I never got it). The problem was that the most stable teams I had changed their members often. After I became a manager, one of the biggest challenges I faced was other managers pushing for fluidity. It was unintuitive for me because of the required context switch and the time and money investment (such as great onboarding, documentation, knowledge sharing, etc.) we had to make for people changing teams to become effective.
When I think about my previous teams, it wasn’t the stability that made them perform well. It was the ownership, autonomy, inclusive environment, people-first, and full-of-feedback culture. It was the no over-time and no over-commitment policies we had.
That’s where I agree with Doc Norton. Doc says,
“Stable teams creates a constraint that limits the bad behavior of over allocation and multiple assignments. If we don’t have this bad behavior, we don’t need the constraint of stable teams.”
It’s easy for leaders to think that the team consists of experts in their domains and that their throughput should be really high. They want faster teams and more and more features to be delivered. Well, it doesn’t really work when the team cannot choose what to work on or differentiate what is more important than the other and cannot keep their focus.
Doc adds in the article,
…companies are discovering that allowing people the autonomy to move from assignment to assignment and from team to team, is not only increasing productivity, it is accelerating learning, and improving retention.
It’s true that autonomy brings a lot of advantages and actually improves retention (people leaving the organization is one of the highest costs). When people clearly know what’s important and can decide what to work on for that important thing, they are more engaged with the work and create higher-quality products.
Although I agree with Doc on the fluidity of teams and people, I still think that stages are a useful mental model. This is where Doc tries to convince me to change my mind.
If you’re a Tuckmanite, right now, you’re probably searching your mental reserves for a way to accept this new information AND hold onto your belief that Tuckman’s is correct or at least correct enough to still be useful. That’s cool. Rationalization is one of our brain’s defense mechanisms when our truth comes into question.
Even though I normally change my mind quickly, this time, I will stick to my mental model but with some adjustments. I am not saying that Tuckman is correct. From my experience, not necessarily a team does have to follow these stages one after another. It’s the culture that follows these stages. The culture has these stages, but it’s also not in sequence. The autonomy, accountability, ownership, feedback, inclusivity, and lack of overcommitment drives teams to the performing state. If the team culture is norming, adding a new member or removing one can alter everything. However, if the culture is strong and stable, a new team member can easily adapt and start performing with the team.
I also still think that people go through these stages by themselves when they face something new. When anyone joins a new team, they start learning things (forming). After some time, they either accept without deeply understanding and critically judging (a dangerous thing) and jump into the norming state, or they ask questions and challenge the status quo and move into a storming state. Once they learn things around, they start performing. And anyone in the team can (and will) go into the storming state anytime. That’s where I still want to keep the mental model alive.
