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and plan and set goals in line with that purpose. Larson and LaFasto (1989) report: ‘in every case, without exception, when an effectively functioning team was identified, it was described by the respondent as having a clear understanding of its objective’.

Clarity of objectives together with a common understanding and agreement of these was seen to be key. In addition Locke and Latham (1984) report that the very act of goal setting was a prime motivator for the team; the more your team sets clear goals the more likely it is to succeed. They also reported a 16 per cent average improvement in effectiveness for teams that use goal setting as an integral part of team activities.

Clear goals are even more important when teams are involved in change, partly because unless they know where they are going they are unlikely to get there, and partly because a strong sense of purpose can mitigate some of the more harmful effects of change. The downside occurs when a team rigidly adheres to its purpose when in fact the world has moved on and other objectives are more appropriate.

Team roles

The best way for a team to achieve its goals is for the team to be structured logically around those goals. Individual team members need to have clear roles and accountabilities. They need to have a clear understanding not only of what their individual role is, but also what the roles and accountabilities of other team members are.

When change happens – within, to or by the team – clarity about roles has two useful functions. It provides a clear sense of purpose and it provides a supportive framework for task accomplishment. However, during change the situation becomes more fluid. Too much rigidity results in tasks falling down the gaps between roles, or overlaps going unnoticed. It might result in team members being less innovative or proactive or courageous.

Team operating processes

A team needs to have certain enabling processes in place for people to carry out their work together. Certain things are needed to allow the task to be achieved in a way that is as efficient and as effective as possible. Glaser and Glaser (1992) comment: ‘both participation in all of the processes of the work group and the development of a collaborative approach are at the heart of effective group work. Because of the tradition

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of autocratic leadership, neither participation nor collaboration are natural or automatic processes. Both require some learning and practice.’

Typical areas that a team need actively to address by discussing and agreeing include:

• frequency, timing and agenda of meetings; • problem-solving and decision-making methodologies; • ground rules; • procedures for dealing with conflict when it occurs; • reward mechanisms for individuals contributing to team goals; • type and style of review process.

In the turbulence created by change, all these areas will come under additional stress and strain, hence the need for processes to have been discussed and agreed at an earlier stage. During times of change when typically pressures and priorities can push people into silo mentality and away from the team, the team operating processes can act like a lubricant, enabling healthy team functioning to continue.

Team interpersonal relationships

The team members must actively communicate among themselves. To achieve clear understanding of goals and roles, the team needs to work together to agree and clarify them. Operating processes must also be discussed and agreed.

To achieve this level of communication, the interpersonal relationships within the team need to be in a relatively healthy state. Glaser and Glaser (1992) found that the literature on team effectiveness ‘prescribes open communication that is assertive and task focused, as well as creating opportunities for giving and receiving feedback aimed at the development of a high trust climate’.

In times of change, individual stress levels rise and there is a tendency to focus more on the task than the people processes. High levels of trust within a team are the bedrock for coping with conflict.

Inter-team relations

Teams cannot work in isolation with any real hope of achieving their organizational objectives. The nature of organizations today – complex,

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sophisticated and with increasingly loose and permeable boundaries – creates situations where a team’s goals can rarely be achieved without input from and output to others.

However smart a team has been in addressing the previous four categories, the authors have found in consulting with numerous organizations that attention needs to be paid to inter-team relations now more than ever before. This is because of the rise of strategic partnerships and global organizations. Teams need to connect more. It is also because the environment is changing faster and is more complex, so keeping in touch with information outside of your own team is a basic survival strategy.

STOP AND THINK!

Q 2.5 Using the five elements above, what is your current team effectiveness? Q 2.6 What needs to change, and how would you go about it?

WHAT TEAM CHANGE LOOKS LIKE

All teams go through a change process when they are first formed, and when significant events occur such as a new member arriving, a key member leaving, a change of scope, increased pressure from outside, or a change in organizational climate.

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Table 2.3 Effective and ineffective teams

Element Team mission, planning and goal setting

Team roles Team operating processes

Team interpersonal relationships

Inter-team relations

Outcome Team more effective, adaptive and change oriented

Clarity of goals and clear direction lead to greater task accomplishment and increased motivation.

Clear roles and responsibilities increase individual accountability and allow others to work at their tasks.

Problem solving and decision making are smoother and faster. Processes enable task accomplishment without undue conflict.

Open data flow and high levels of team working leading to task accomplishment in a supportive environment.

Working across boundaries ensures that organizational goals are more likely to be achieved.

Team less effective, less adaptive and change oriented

Lack of purpose and unclear goals result in dissipation of energy and effort.

Unclear roles and responsibilities lead to increased conflict and reduced accountability.

Unclear operating processes increase time and effort needed to progress task achievement.

Dysfunctional team working causes tensions, conflict, stress and insufficient focus on task accomplishment.

Teams working in isolation or against other teams reduce the likelihood of organizational goal achievement.

Tuckman (1965) is one of the most widely quoted of researchers into the linear model of team development. His work is regularly used in team building within organizations. Most people will have heard of it as the ‘forming, storming, norming, performing’ model of team development. His basic premise is that any team will undergo distinct stages of development as it works or struggles towards effective team functioning. Although we will describe Tuckman’s model in some detail, we have selected a range of models to illustrate the team development process, as shown in Table 2.4.

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Table 2.4 Key attributes in the stages of team development

Tuckman (1965)

Forming Storming Norming Performing Attempt at establishing primary purpose, structure, roles, leader, task and process relationships, and boundaries of the team

Dealing with arising conflicts surrounding key questions from forming stage

Settling down of team dynamic and stepping into team norms and agreed ways of working

Team is now ready and enabled to focus primarily on its task while attending to individual and team maintenance needs

Modlin and Faris (1956)

Structuralism Unrest Change Integration Attempt to recreate previous power within new team structures

Attempt to resolve power and interpersonal issues

Roles emerge based on task and people needs Sense of team emerges

Team purpose and structure emerge and accepted, action towards team goals

Whittaker (1970)

Preaffiliation Power and control Intimacy Differentiation Sense of unease, unsure of team engagement, which is superficial

Focus on who has power and authority within the team Attempt to define roles

Team begins to commit to task and engage with one another

Ability to be clear about individual roles and interactions become workmanlike

Scott Peck (1990)

Pseudocommunity Chaos Emptiness Community Members try to fake teamliness Attempt to establish

pecking order and team norms

Giving up of expectations, assumptions and hope of achieving anything

Acceptance of each other and focus on the task

Schutz (1982)

In or out Top or bottom Near or far Members decide whether they are part of the team or not

Focus on who has power and authority within the team

Finding levels of commitment and engagement within their roles

Hill and Gruner (1973)

Orientation Exploration Production Structure sought Exploration around team roles

and relations Clarity of team roles and team cohesion

Bion (1961)

Dependency Fight or flight Pairing Team members invest the leaders with all the power and authority

Team members challenge the leaders or other members Team members withdraw

Team members form pairings in an attempt to resolve their anxieties

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Tuckman’s model of team change

Forming

Forming is the first stage. This involves the team asking a set of fundamental questions:

• What is our primary purpose? • How do we structure ourselves as a team to achieve our purpose? • What roles do we each have? • Who is the leader? • How will we work together? • How will we relate together? • What are the boundaries of the team?

(Bion’s insights – see below – refer to observed phenomena and do not imply a sequence.) If we were to take a logical rational view of the team we could imagine that this could all be

accomplished relatively easily and relatively painlessly. And sometimes, on short projects with less than five team members, it is. However, human beings are not completely logical rational creatures, and sometimes this process is difficult. We all have emotions, personalities, unique characteristics and personal motivations.

As we saw when we were exploring individual change, human beings react to change in different ways. And the formation of a new team is about individuals adjusting to change in their own individual ways.

Initially the questions may be answered in rather a superficial fashion. The primary task of the team might be that which was written down in a memo from the departmental head, along with the structure they first thought of. The leader might typically have been appointed beforehand and ‘imposed’ upon the team. Individuals’ roles are agreed to in an initial and individual cursory meeting with the team leader.

The team may agree to relate via a set of ground rules using words that nobody could possibly object to, but nobody knows what they really mean in practice: ‘be honest’, ‘team before self’, ‘have fun’, and so on.

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Storming

Tuckman’s next stage is storming. This is a description of the dynamic that occurs when a team of individuals come together to work on a common task, and have passed through the phase of being nice to one another and not voicing their individual concerns. This dynamic occurs as the team strives or struggles to answer fully the questions postulated in the forming stage.

Statements articulated (or left unsaid) in some fashion or form might include ones such as:

• I don’t think we should be aiming for that. • This structure hasn’t taken account of this. • There are rather a lot of grey areas in our individual accountabilities. • Why was he appointed as team leader when he hasn’t done this before? • I don’t know whether I can work productively with these people. • How can we achieve our goals without the support from others in the organization?

An alternative word to storming is ‘testing’. Individuals and the team as a whole are testing out the assumptions that had been made when the team was originally formed. Obviously different teams will experience this stage with different degrees of intensity, but important points to note here are:

• it is a natural part of the process; • it is a healthy part of the process; • it is an important part of the process.

The storming phase – if successfully traversed – will achieve clarity on all the fundamental questions of the first phase, and enable common understanding of purpose and roles to be achieved. In turn it allows the authority of the team leader to be seen and acknowledged, and it allows everyone to take up his or her rightful place within the team. It also gives team members a sense of the way things will happen within the

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team. It becomes a template for future ways of acting, problem solving, decision making and relating.

Norming

The third stage of team development occurs when the team finally settles down into working towards achievement of its task without too much attention needed on the fundamental questions. As further challenges develop, or as individuals grow further into their roles, then further scrutiny of the fundamental questions may happen. They may be discussed, but if they instead remain hidden beneath the surface this can result in loss of attention on the primary task.

Tuckman suggests in his review of the research that this settling process can be relatively straightforward and sequential. The team moves through the storming phase into a way of working that establishes team norms. It can also be more sporadic and turbulent, with the team needing further storming before team norms are established. Indeed some readers might have experienced teams that permanently move back and forth between the norming and storming stages – a clear signal that some team issues are not being surfaced and dealt with.

Performing

The final stage of team development is performing. The team has successfully traversed the three previous stages and therefore has clarity about its purpose, its structure and its roles. It has engaged in a rigorous process of working out how it should work and relate together, and is comfortable with the team norms it has established. Not only has the team worked these things through, but it has embodied them as a way of working. It has developed a capacity to change and develop, and has learnt how to learn.

The team can quite fruitfully get on with the task in hand and attend to individual and team needs at the same time.

Adjourning

A fifth stage was later added that acknowledged that teams do not last for ever. This stage represents the period when the team’s task has been completed and team members disperse. Some practitioners call this stage mourning, highlighting the emotional component. Others call it transforming as team members develop other ways of working.

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THE LEADERSHIP ISSUES IN TEAM CHANGE

FOOD FOR THOUGHT Ralph Stacey, in his book Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics (1993), describes what happens when a group is brought together to study the experience of being in a group, without any further task and without an appointed leader. Known as a Group Relations Conference and run by the Tavistock Institute in London, this process involves a consultant who forms part of the group to offer views on the group process but otherwise takes no conscious part in the activity. This:

always provokes high levels of anxiety in the participants… which… find expression in all manner of strange behaviours. Group discussions take on a manic form with asinine comments and hysterical laughter… the participants attack the visiting consultant… becoming incredibly rude….

Members try to replace the non-functioning consultant… but they rarely seem to be successful in this endeavour. They begin to pick on an individual, usually some highly individualistic or minority member of the group, and then treat this person as some kind of scapegoat. They all become very concerned with remaining part of the group, greatly fearing exclusion. They show strong tendencies to conform to rapidly established group norms and suppress their individual differences, perhaps they are afraid of becoming the scapegoat… the one thing they hardly do at all is to examine the behaviour they are indulging in, the task they have actually been given.

The situation described in the box offers a way of exploring some of the unconscious group processes that are at work just below the surface. These are not always visible in more conventional team situations. The work of Bion (1961) and Scott Peck (1990) is useful to illuminate some of the phenomena that can be observed and experienced in groups, and highlight the challenges for leaders.

Moving through dependency

In any team formation the first thing people look for is someone to tell them what to do. This is a perfectly natural phenomenon, given that many people will want to get on with the task and many people will

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believe someone else knows what the task is and how it should be done.

In any unfamiliar situation or environment people can become dependent. Jon Stokes (in Obholzer and Roberts, 1994) describes what Bion observed in his experience with groups and called basic group assumptions:

a group dominated by basic assumption of dependency behaves as if its primary task is solely to provide for the satisfaction of the needs and wishes of its members. The leader is expected to look after, protect and sustain the members of the group, to make them feel good, and not to face them with the demands of the group’s real purpose.

The job of the leader, and indeed the group, is not only to establish leadership credibility and accountability but to establish its limits. This will imbue the rest of the team with sufficient power for them to accomplish their tasks. The leader can do this by modelling the taking of individual responsibility and empowering others to do the same, and by ensuring that people are oriented in the right direction and have a common understanding of team purpose and objectives.

Moving through conflict

Bion’s second assumption is labelled ‘fight or flight’. Bion (1961) says: There is a danger or ‘enemy’, which should either be attacked or fled from … members look to the leader to devise some appropriate action… for instance, instead of considering how best to organize its work, a team may spend most of the time worrying about rumours of organizational change. This provides a sense of togetherness, whilst also serving to avoid facing the difficulties of the work itself. Alternatively, such a group may spend its time protesting angrily, without actually planning any specific action to deal with the perceived threat.

The threat might not necessarily be coming from outside, but instead might be an externalization – or projection – from the team. The real threat is from within, and the potential for conflict is between the leader and the rest of the team, and between team members themselves. Issues about power and authority and where people sit in the ‘pecking order’ may surface at this stage.

The leadership task here is to surface any of these dynamics and work them through, either by the building of trust and the frank, open and

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