Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing — by Dan Lynn

By Dan Lynn

During my MBA, I learned a simple model about how teams develop. Nearly thirty years later, it may be the thing from those classrooms I quote most often.

It's called Tuckman's model — psychologist Bruce Tuckman described it back in 1965. Every team, he found, moves through four stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing. First everyone is polite and careful — that's forming. Then the friction shows up: personalities clash, roles get contested, everything feels harder than it should — storming. Then the team settles: ways of working emerge, trust builds — norming. And finally it clicks, and the team produces more than the sum of its people — performing.

The reason I quote it all the time is simple: it always plays out that way. Every team I've built, joined, or advised — new company, new department, new partnership — same four stages, same order. The names are almost annoyingly cute, but the sequence is real.

Here's why knowing it matters. The storming phase feels like failure. It isn't — it's a stage. If you don't know the model, you look at a new team full of friction and conclude you hired wrong or the team is broken, and you blow it up right before it would have settled. If you do know the model, storming becomes almost reassuring: we're on schedule. Your job as a leader isn't to prevent the storm. It's to steer through it and keep everyone aboard until the norming starts.

But the most useful moment to use the model is before the storm ever arrives. With every new team, someone eventually says to me: "Wow, this is such a great team — everyone is working so well together." That's forming. Enjoy it — but recognize it for what it is. I always tell them the same thing: the storming stage is coming, and when it arrives, don't be alarmed. A team that's heard the forecast doesn't panic when the weather changes.

One more thing worth knowing: when the team changes — someone joins, someone leaves — the clock resets, at least partway. You form again. You storm again, hopefully smaller.

Four words. I've gotten more mileage out of them than almost anything else I learned in school. So the next time your new team is struggling, ask yourself: is this broken — or is this just storming?