There's an irritating pattern you see in most organizations or businesses: they have to form teams to get jobs done, but teams are manned by people and people don't always work together well For this reason there's been a considerable interest in team building in the West since the late 1940s.

For the last 40 years one description of team development has been accepted in the West. It was first brought to our attention in a small study of 50 academic papers published by navy researcher Bruce Tuckman in 1965. In this ground-breaking paper he described four stages of a team's life: forming, storming, norming and performing.

Other researchers through the West agree that a team does change if it is together for some time. Indeed it's almost common-sense that when people first group together they will want to know about the others, will have to adapt and accommodate other members, could face conflicts that need to be resolved, but eventually may become a harmonious unit getting more done together than each would have on their own.

Forming is the first of Tuckman's stages

This first stage is about getting to know each other and the structures and rules limiting the team. This is a stage when members rely on each other, or where the team's been in existence for some time, on the things that order and define the team.

Tuckman said that groups then entered a second stage, the Storming.

This is something we do as it is common to resist being influenced by a group you're part of. And Tuckman's term for this second stage is a good choice. (Who said sociology was plain vanilla!).

But then stage three arrives, Tuckman said, calling it the Norming stage.

Members begin to talk and express their own opinions, the team becomes a unit, and goals and jobs get adopted and (largely) agreed on.

Because of this the team is able to grow into the Performing phase in Tuckman's sequence.

This is the high point of the team's life. Because members understand and accept each other they work better together. They all focus on completing jobs, helping each other where necessary and switching jobs when needed. Everyone supports the leader and the other team members.

Tuckman and others did more work on this model in the years that followed. But today the broad outline of these four stages is still widely accepted even now. He discovered them in the journals of the 1960s, managed to put them down clearly on paper, gave each stage a memorable label, and left for us a way of looking at how small teams develop that is grounded in what is real.