Tuckman's stages of group development: forming to performing

Bruce Tuckman was a psychologist working for the US Naval Medical Research Institute when he published Developmental Sequence in Small Groups in 1965. He had reviewed around fifty studies of group behaviour — therapy groups, training groups, natural and laboratory groups — looking for a common pattern. Four stages came out of it, and they rhymed, which is probably why they became the most quoted model in management training.

The rhyme has done the model a disservice. It gets taught as a tidy escalator when Tuckman's actual finding was messier and more useful: groups have to work through interpersonal issues before they can work on the task, and the two run in parallel.

The stages

Tuckman framed each stage as having a group structure aspect (how people relate to each other) and a task activity aspect (what they do about the work). Forming pairs dependence with orientation; storming pairs conflict with emotional resistance to the task; norming pairs cohesion with open exchange; performing pairs functional role-relatedness with genuine problem-solving.

Adjourning came later, in a 1977 review with Mary Ann Jensen — an honest addition, since the original four had nothing to say about a project team disbanding.

Applied in a UK workplace

Consider a newly formed cross-functional team in a housing association, brought together to cut the time between a repair being reported and being completed. Six people: two from the repairs call centre, two trade supervisors, one from finance, one from IT.

Forming (weeks 1–2). Everybody is agreeable. The team lead does most of the talking, the finance representative says almost nothing, and the meeting produces a list of things to "look into". The politeness is not agreement — it is people working out whether it is safe to disagree.

Storming (weeks 3–6). It arrives the moment the work becomes concrete. The trade supervisors say the call centre logs jobs with useless descriptions; the call centre says the trades never update job status. The finance representative wants a cost cap nobody else thinks is realistic. Two members stop attending. This is the stage that decides whether the team ever works.

What the team lead does here matters more than anything else in the model. Suppressing the argument — "let's keep this positive" — converts a solvable task conflict into a durable relationship conflict. Instead: get the two accounts of the job-description problem on the wall side by side, agree that both are true, and make the decision rights explicit (who decides the new job template, and who is consulted).

Norming (weeks 7–10). A shared job template is agreed. Meetings start on time because somebody said something about it. An informal norm emerges that data gets checked before anyone argues from it — genuinely valuable, and nobody wrote it down.

Performing (weeks 11+). The team pilots the new process in one area, disagrees productively about the results, and adjusts without escalating. The lead is now mostly removing obstacles elsewhere in the organisation.

And then backwards. In month five, one trade supervisor leaves and is replaced, and the team briefly re-storms: the new member does not accept the agreed template, and the compromises that produced it are not written down anywhere. A team that understands the model expects this. A team that thinks the stages are a one-way escalator concludes the new person is a problem.

Criticisms and limitations

This is where Level 5 marks live, and where most articles stop.

• The evidence base is not what its popularity implies. Tuckman drew on studies dominated by therapy and training groups, not workplace teams doing operational work with real consequences. He said so himself.
• It is descriptive, not prescriptive. The model tells you what tends to happen; it does not tell you what to do, and the "what to do at each stage" advice bolted on by trainers over the years is largely folklore rather than Tuckman.
• The stages are not discrete or strictly sequential. Real teams storm and norm at the same time, on different issues. Gersick's 1988 research on project teams found something quite different — long periods of stable behaviour interrupted by a burst of change at the temporal midpoint of the project, which fits deadline-driven work better than a smooth progression.
• Some teams never storm — and that is not always good news. In a hierarchical or fearful culture, the absence of storming can mean disagreement has been driven out of the room, not resolved. A quiet team is not necessarily a performing one.
• It says little about composition or context. Two teams with identical stage histories can perform very differently because of skills, resources, or whether their objectives conflict with the wider organisation's. Belbin addresses composition; Tuckman does not.
• The vocabulary can license bad management. "We're just storming" is used to explain away conflict that is actually about a real, fixable problem — an unworkable target, an unfair workload split, or one member's behaviour.

The strongest way to use the model at Level 5 is diagnostically and provisionally: it gives you a language for what is happening and a reason not to panic, while you look for the specific cause.

How to evidence this in your ILM portfolio

Both qualifications are assessed by a portfolio of evidence from your own workplace, so what is assessed is your leadership of a real team — the model is the lens, not the evidence.

Level 3 — Unit 315 Developing a high performing team and Unit 303 Managing the performance of others. Evidence that works:

• A reflective account of a period when your team was clearly in storming: what the disagreement was actually about, what you did, what happened next, and what you would do differently.
• Products of work: the team purpose statement or terms of reference you wrote at forming, the agreed ways of working from norming, meeting notes showing how a disagreement was handled.
• A witness testimony from a team member or your manager on how you handled the friction.
• Observation by your assessor of a team meeting, where a professional discussion afterwards lets you explain the stage you judged the team to be in and why.

Level 5 — Unit 503 Managing people, where high-performing teams are named explicitly, and Unit 504 Leading people and organisational culture where you lead more than one team. At Level 5 you must evaluate: say where Tuckman fitted your team and where it did not, and what you used instead. Comparing it with Gersick's punctuated equilibrium, or noting that your team's real problem was composition rather than development, is exactly the analytical step the criteria are asking for.

Also relevant: Unit 507 Leading and managing wellbeing in the workplace at Level 5 if the storming stage had a genuine wellbeing dimension, and Unit 313 Planning and leading structured workplace communication at Level 3 if your evidence includes chairing the meetings where it was resolved.

See portfolio of evidence for the mechanics and reflective account examples for the writing.

Where to go next

• Belbin team roles — team composition, the thing Tuckman leaves out.
• Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes — five ways to handle the storming stage.
• Adair's action-centred leadership — balancing task, team and individual through the stages.
• Ready to qualify? Compare ILM Level 3 and ILM Level 5.