All teams will confront issues and behavior that can hurt their effectiveness and prevent them from achieving their purpose. This is especially true for novice teams. The team will function better, with more openness and mutual accountability, if many of the divisive issues and behaviors are discussed, and team norms developed relatively early after formation. As teams develop over time, they will pass through four phases. These phases have been named by several Organizational Development gurus. I prefer the model described by Peter Scholtes in The Team Handbook. He refers to the phases as: 1) Forming, 2) Storming, 3) Norming, and 4) Performing. In the Norming phase, the team members are gradually learning how to work with each other, developing policies and procedures, and getting a sense of what each person can contribute. At this time, each member may have an internal dialog that says, Well, we can achieve our purpose if…
For this to be helpful, the following requisites must exist:
Following are a few examples of areas in which team norms (common expectations, procedures, reactions) can be helpful:
There are many more issues that could surface. The advantage of having all this up front is that it develops a standard of behavior and known consequences, outside the heat of battle. It also removes the non-uniform treatment of people because of rank or status, if dealt with before an incident occurs. The early resolution of these issues can provide the team with some small successes in their process before they tackle the main problem, and the potential ego, turf, or power issues that crop up. Small successes are very important to a novice team, and will provide energy to move a team on into a true performance phase. All teams will pass through the four phases noted above and this passage will be smoothed and speeded up if they develop team norms early in their process. This provides the team with known expectations and enables them to focus on purpose, rather than egos. |
