Episode 5 - The good, the bad, and the ugly about starting a new team

Does forming, storming, and norming really work? Join Deanna and Kara as they break down how this model works with psychological safety.

To read more:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1965-12187-001
https://www.mindtools.com/abyj5fi/forming-storming-norming-and-performing
https://teamhood.com/team-performance-resources/team-development-cycle/

Transcript

Deanna: 0:05

Hi, this is Deanna,

Kara: 0:07

And this is Kara.

Deanna: 0:08

and this is the Got PS podcast, the podcast where we talk about psychological safety. Kara, we haven't talked in two weeks, why don't you tell me what you're up to?

Kara: 0:19

I am still running and I'm going to be having a 10k race a week from today.

Deanna: 0:25

oh god, you're nuts.

Kara: 0:27

going to say, I'm

Deanna: 0:27

also means we probably won't, record next week too, right?

Kara: 0:31

actually it's on Saturday, we'll be okay. We can still record next week.

Deanna: 0:34

You sure?

Kara: 0:35

Oh yeah, I'll be long recovered. Hey. At my age. Yeah. I'm just glad it moves.

Deanna: 0:40

Well, good for you.

Kara: 0:42

How about you? You, had fun last weekend.

Deanna: 0:45

I went to Connecticut for a cousin's wedding. It was a good time to see all the family, and one of the things I loved best about it was during the reception. Okay, there was a wall of donuts. How much better can you get than a wall of donuts?

Kara: 0:58

love your family already. Okay. Keep going.

Deanna: 1:00

There was also the way the tables were grouped. I was in the cousin table. Me and all my cousins were assigned to the same table. It was really a great chance to catch up and learn about what's going on in all their lives since we're scattered all over the country.

Kara: 1:14

When's the last time you got a chance to talk to them?

Deanna: 1:16

My grandmother's funeral.

Kara: 1:19

Got it. It's hard, especially when people are geographically all over the place.

Deanna: 1:22

Yeah, and some of my cousins didn't even come back for the funeral. It was nice to talk to them, hear how one of them she and her husband are restoring a 1930s house that they recently bought. Just hearing, what everyone's doing.

Kara: 1:39

That's awesome. And I think you told me that you had a special cousin that is maybe listening to our podcast.

Deanna: 1:45

Yes, apparently one of my cousins is listening to the podcast. You know who you are. Hi.

Kara: 1:51

That's awesome. Thank you, Deanna's cousin.

Deanna: 1:54

Yes. So, very exciting.

Kara: 1:56

What are we talking about today, Deanna?

Deanna: 1:58

we are still talking about the community portion of Full Stack Psychological Safety. If you may remember from our prior discussions, the model consists of five phases, starting with culture, which has to do with how the corporate culture is and how that affects teams, community, where we're working right now, which is all about sort of starting up the teams and getting everything comfortable, followed by conversation, contribution, and commitment. Next week, we'll be moving on to conversation.

Kara: 2:28

Digging a little bit deeper into what community safety is. This is your baseline team psychological safety. Everybody feels welcome. They have access to everything they need. They, understand their place on the team and they're all valued.

Deanna: 2:44

Last episode, we talked about having somebody on board to a team. Today, we're going to talk about starting up a new team. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the whole forming, storming, norming, and performing model that was created by psychologist Bruce Tuckman in 1965. Lot of this deals with psychological safety.

Kara: 3:09

Deanna and I were on a team where our team lead very much loved to talk about this particular model for team development. I could see Deanna viscerally reacting every time he brought it up. I was talking about this particular model a couple of weeks ago and Deanna's like, it still bugs me. And so she did some research. She looked at, current conversations online about it. You're going to hear verbatim what her visceral reactions are.

Deanna: 3:40

Forming, storming, norming, and performing are still a very popular framework for discussing how to build up a new team. That's because there's a decent chunk about it that's good, but there's some things I dislike. We'll get to that as we move forward. We start with forming. You're a group of individuals, you've been thrown together into a team. You may not know each other, and you may not know exactly what you're doing. In forming, you should be setting your team norms. what your goals are, your communication styles, expectations and roles. You should have a chance to get to know each other. I really don't have any issues with the forming. phase. This seems like reasonable stuff. You want to know how people communicate. You want to have expectations and know where everyone fits in. And you want to have an idea of what the goal is for the team. You need to get to know each other and not just on a work level, but on a personal level, because it's fine to say, I'm the DBA and you're the software engineer. That doesn't tell me about how you're going to react when I do something.

Kara: 4:49

Usually in this case, somebody is the task lead. They're going to probably do a lot of the team through this, they will set some of the team norms nominally to start and then adjust them as everybody gets to know each other. A lot of times when we form teams, Some of the people are coming from the same departments and some people are completely new. They don't know anybody on the team. They're pulled in because they have particular expertise. There are cases where some people have some comfortableness that not maybe everybody has. Need to be a little bit aware of that.

Deanna: 5:28

Also, don't think that you can get to know each other in one meeting where you go around and do introductions. Getting to know each other takes a while. It's going to require some trust building, which may not exist at the moment. Especially if you're on a team where some of the people know each other and you don't, you're going to feel like an outsider. The people who know each other are going to have to take extra effort to make sure that the people they don't know feel included in this new team.

Kara: 5:58

I just joined a team at the beginning of the year. And Everybody on the team was from the same department except for me. I have to say they were extremely great. I never felt like I was extra, outside, different. They treated me with respect and welcomed me aboard with no problems. It worked out well. But watch out for cliques. Watch out for, those people because when you feel comfortable with people that you've worked with before, sometimes those are well tread roads and you don't work as much to bring some of those other people in that you don't know as well.

Deanna: 6:35

And be careful about snap judgments, which I personally do a lot. You're going to meet these people for the first time, and depending on what they say, usually within the first two or three sentences, you've already made a judgment of, I'm going to like this guy, I'm going to dislike this guy, meh, something like that. Be open to the fact that maybe that snap judgment is incorrect. Unless, of course, you're me, in which case it's always correct, but we won't discuss that.

Kara: 7:05

You are perfection. I think I've said this before in terms of snap judgments. I just remember being in the first meeting with Deanna when I joined a project she was on. This is, oh, wow, almost six years ago. I remember the dynamics of that team, you were, joking and kidding and trying to make light and I was okay, I get that. I gravitate towards that. I take work seriously, but not so seriously. Some of the other people were so serious. This is an interesting dynamic.

Deanna: 7:37

Interesting is a word.

Kara: 7:40

Dysfunctional probably was what it ended up being, but that's okay.

Deanna: 7:43

Something we may discuss probably not this season, but maybe next season we'll discuss what to do with a dysfunctional team.

Kara: 7:50

Once you get to forming, everybody's been on new teams, and they've met people, you're kind of getting used to things, you're figuring out if you like to talk via Slack and Teams and all this and that, you get comfortable a couple weeks past. What's next, Deanna?

Deanna: 8:03

Then we move to the storming phase, where people are sort of struggling to collaborate. You'll find that often, they'll start breaking into small groups with their own leader based on preferred ways of working, based on whether they like each other or not, or something. Remember those snap judgments I said? If you decide you hate all but two people on the team, you're probably going to Form your own little tiny subgroup with the two people you can tolerate.

Kara: 8:31

The thing I really like about just the idea of the storming phase, maybe not all of it, is that when you do join a new team and say you're a month in and things are feeling Uncomfortable. You don't feel like you're being productive. You're still trying to figure out all of your roles and how you're gonna kind of dance around each other to get to, build effective products and have great outcomes. I like remembering there is a storming phase. I'm trying to get used to these people. We've only known each other for a month. I've never worked with them before. It's okay if it feels weird. I use the storming phase almost like a permission to myself to say, everybody's probably feeling this way because we're all trying to figure things out and it's okay.

Deanna: 9:20

I'm good with that. The thing I have an issue with about storming is they always talk about team members pushing against established boundaries. Being able to push against boundaries requires a level of psychological safety you're not going to have in storming. People are going to obey. They may find little subversive, passive aggressive ways, but they're not going to come out and push. Because of that, you may think, I'm not in the storming phase. I don't see anyone pushing. We must be in a better phase. No, no, no. People aren't going to be comfortable enough to actually push against you. One thing that is true about storming is that people are going to feel overwhelmed by the workload or frustrated by the lack of progress. If there's a lack of clarity. I was on one project and we got through the forming stage and then we bounced storming and back to forming again. Our team lead was very vague on what they expected us to do. It was very frustrating because we would each have our own point of view and think we knew what we were doing. When we would present it, we would be told that that was wrong, but we wouldn't be told What the actual goal was or what they wanted, they would just sort of expect you to intuit by them saying a word like, get me a rock. What kind of rock? What they mean is get me a diamond engagement ring with Sapphire baguettes.

Kara: 10:46

I

Deanna: 10:46

I would never guess that. There's going to be issues. And it's not just going to be problems with the team. It's going to be problems with leaders, too. You've got to be able to look back at yourself and say, Am I doing everything I can to help the team? Or am I part of the problem?

Kara: 11:05

It's interesting that you pulled out pushing against established boundaries as like one of your big things that you didn't really like about it because when I think of storming I usually think people are quiet. They're usually like, I have no idea what's going on. I. don't understand what I'm being asked to do and I don't feel comfortable speaking up and asking a lot of questions. I'm going to go off and hope I can figure it out on my own. I usually think of it not as pushing on boundaries but just not saying anything at all and hoping that you'll figure it out as you go. The other thing is Deanna and I are going to begin working on a part of psychological safety that talks more about individual responsibilities in a team with psychological safety and the kind of the baggage you bring and deciphering all of that. When it comes to pushing against established boundaries, not everybody has the personality that they would even do that anyway.

Deanna: 12:03

You're going to find, splitting into several small groups, that's going to happen. I suppose that's a way of pushing against boundaries, rather than working as one big team. You're now in a lot of small little sub teams. And in those sub teams, you're probably talking smack about the other teams. At least, I do.

Kara: 12:21

When you're in a team and it's storming, and you do go into these little sub teams, you're trying desperately to create psychological safety however you can in this larger team that you're in. And if that means breaking off and talking smack in a small team, that's creating a little safety bubble for yourself so that you can go ahead and do your job that day.

Deanna: 12:44

As a team lead, you need to be aware of that. You should recognize that the quiet May actually represent conflict, even though they're not saying it, you may start seeing people breaking off into little teams and you may need to approach each small team individually and talk to them advice. I've been given on the storming phase is to listen to all sides of the conflict and facilitate a middle ground, but this implies that there's conflict. Conflict is rarely going to be visible in this storming phase. It's all going to be behind the scenes. It's all going to be mostly passive aggressive crap, or nothing at all.

Kara: 13:23

Another thing Deanna and I were talking about when we were talking about the storming phase is for our work and probably everybody else's work, we work with our customers pretty directly. When you talk about a team, at our company, we're hired to make a particular product. We get together, we make our team. That's one. bubble of, forming and storming. But then whenever the customer dives into the team and you're interfacing with them, they, are part of your team. And if the team is not getting along with the customer and the customer is not happy with what the team is doing, oh boy, that can drag everybody back to storming real fast. And I've seen that numerous times.

Deanna: 14:05

You may fall back into the forming phase. For instance, you may have come up with goals and communication methods and such, but you may have realized that the communication methods you developed at the beginning aren't actually serving the needs of the team, or, the more time you spend with the client, you may discover, maybe I actually need to change our goals around. don't be afraid to fall back into forming.

Kara: 14:30

sometimes that's the best use of time. And if you fall back in forming at that point, you actually have probably better relationships or hopefully a little bit more honest relationships. When you form the team, you're going to do it with a little bit more intention and knowledge and awareness. It's probably going to be a little more effective. All

Deanna: 14:51

forming and storming, you're going to want to have individual one on ones with each of the team members. So you can get to know them better, but also see how they feel about things. don't be surprised if they completely lie to you and say, yeah, everything's good. Because, They're not safe with you. This is going to be a struggle, especially in the beginning, to develop that kind of rapport where they'll actually tell you, I think this is complete crap. Or, your idea of telling me to bring a rock is not clear enough for me to understand. not going to say that initially. it's scary. This person is your boss. They can affect promotions, they can affect your raises, they may even affect your ability to stay in that company. You need to be aware that just because people are agreeing with you or not saying anything bad doesn't mean they're not thinking it.

Kara: 15:45

As an individual person on the team, I know I feel better when I do get that time where I get to work with all of the team members one on one at some point in time. That makes me feel safe. overall in the team. If you want to invest in your team's psychological safety, start building those individual relationships.

Deanna: 16:07

Remember the relationships may be I'm on one team, there's somebody who thinks I'm like a friend and a mentor, and I think they're an idiot. So, I'm trying to be very nice and mentor, and I'm not trying to say I don't think there's enough there to mentor. Even though I'm thinking.

Kara: 16:29

There's not enough there to mentor.

Deanna: 16:32

Alright.

Kara: 16:32

on, moving on. I think coming out of storming into the next phase is the hard one.

Deanna: 16:37

that's norming. Where you have an idea that everyone's working together towards a common goal, you're all pulling in the same direction. But you still may see some lack of clarity and power struggles. And maybe, there'll be acceptance of the team lead, maybe there's not. You feel like you're gelling as a team by the time you get to norming. But it doesn't actually mean everything's really working well. I think a lot of people think they're in the norming stage when they're still actually in storming because people are afraid to say what they really think. Do not think, we're doing great. We're norming because you may not be. That's why you're going to have to actually pay attention to the people on your team and what they're doing. Read body language. Listen to intonation. Figure out why somebody's always quiet in meetings. Maybe they're quiet because they don't feel there's anything to contribute. Maybe they're quiet because they're afraid if they open their mouth they're just going to spew. The problem with norming is the assumption that you're actually going to get this and and it's going to feel right. I think a lot of people mistake quiet storming for norming.

Kara: 17:47

The one thing when I was reading the materials that you used to prepare for this podcast today, Deanna that really bothered me about norming they believe that you would come out of the woods and into the clearing of norming as a whole team on its own, you will just rectify everything and the angels shall sing and there'll be rainbows and puppies and unicorns. That is just not the case. there's intention that has to go along with getting you from storming to norming. It just is not going to happen. Everybody's got to have intention to want it to happen.

Deanna: 18:26

It's hard. It's okay if you only sometimes reach norming and then fall back to storming. That's perfectly normal. It's hard to get a whole team to gel, especially if it's only for a short term project. If it's only four months, it's not going to happen. This is something that's going to take place over the course of a year or even two years, and you need to be patient and understand that. One of the things I dislike about the advice that I found was, it says, recognize the value of everyone on the team. You should have been doing that in forming. Why are you waiting until norming to recognize that people have value? That is complete crap. Rather than accepting the fact that they're on that team brings value in and of themselves. It really bothers me that you're not going to value people or have honest communications until you reach norming. Some of these things should be done a lot earlier. Some of these things are going to happen later. You may be all going in the same direction, but there may be that all conflict is just being quiet.

Kara: 19:27

That's very true.

Deanna: 19:28

I have been on many meetings where we're all working towards a common goal, and it feels like we're norming, but behind the scenes, I'm going, this is crap. I don't believe it. This is crap.

Kara: 19:38

I've worked on projects where we are creating a white paper, the team is made up of representatives of different technical expertise areas, and, we get together and we decide the direction we're going to go in the white paper, the pieces parts we're going to need in the white paper and assign who's going to work on each piece. Then usually there's somebody who's a book boss in that case. The book boss is going to interact with most people on the team, and the other people are probably not going to interact with each other too much. You're only going to get to a certain level of overall zen on the team. That's all you're probably going to need, because those projects, are usually, a 3 4 month turnaround. It's just not necessarily, kumbaya ing together constantly to try to build up this whole team camaraderie. Would it be nice? Of course! I like knowing, people that I work with in the organization. I like making new connections at work, making potentially new friends. Love all that kind of stuff. Is it necessary? Maybe not.

Deanna: 20:41

That's the case with psychological safety too. If you're a scratch team that's been put together to just audit this one site, and then you're gone, you don't really need high psychological safety. Likewise, you don't need to actually get to norming.

Kara: 20:54

If you're working on a short term project, you need to start at a level where you're valuing everybody. Because if you're not valuing everybody to start, you're not going to be able to do that quick turnaround task. You're not going to trust them at least to do their part.

Deanna: 21:08

You need to assume the fact that they're here on your team implies a level of value already.

Kara: 21:14

Mm hmm.

Deanna: 21:14

Then we get to nirvana, which is performing. this is when the team is just rocking, they're doing efficient work, they've got predictable results, they're dealing with issues constructively, everyone is happy to mix up roles and work together and argue for the best possible solution. I would say that you reach performing 5 percent of the time.

Kara: 21:38

I would probably agree with that.

Deanna: 21:40

It's hard. There's going to be internal conflicts, there's going to be external conflicts. There's going to be things that affect you. Can it happen? yes. Is it going to happen often? Probably not. Setting your goal to be performing, you're probably going to be a little disappointed. Try and get to norming and hope for occasional flashes of performance.

Kara: 22:02

When I'm looking at performing, I'm hearkening back to my Lockheed days when I worked at Lockheed, I worked on two long term projects five years each. Both of those got to performing. It's because I was with the same people for multiple years. When I was working on those software teams way back in the day, We knew the requirements up front. We knew the schedule of how things were going to play out, the customer actually allowed us to get to performing as well, because we had this roadmap, we knew six months at a time, what work was going to look like, so we could get to high functioning because Everybody knew their role, they knew what they were going to develop, they had their requirements, and we were chugging along. There were every once in a while, conflicts of a personal nature, not work nature. I worked with somebody who went to a church that did not believe women should be pastors and whenever that came up, we did agree to disagree, and we did respect each other. Then there was our lead who really thought one of the people on the team was not that bright. He let it be known in the snarkiest of fashions. Whenever he could. But for the most part we were high performing, we got the work done. It was pretty seamless. We were executing to schedule very easily. But it did take years

Deanna: 23:29

Don't think you're going to hit this in six months, or even a year. As Kara said, it's going to take years to get to performing, usually. be patient and accept the fact that you're not going to get there quickly, and don't push things, because you'll make it worse. One of the issues I have with this, is the idea we're setting these goals for you as a team lead. You've got to get to performing. They're going to be tempted to push it, because they want to be able to say, I've reached the top. We're there. When your pushing is going to cause something to be less psychologically safe, and your team's going to struggle more. You may end up lying to yourself about the health of your team.

Kara: 24:08

As engineers. We have to be really careful, I can be very competitive. I can also be very. checklist oriented and you have to be careful if that's your mindset. You look at things like forming, storming, norming, performing, or even our full stack psychological safety thinking that it's achievement based or checklist based. What we're trying to do is give you a lexicon around What you may be feeling and understanding you can talk to your team about how you can make things better or how you can identify problems and be able to move forward in a way that works for everybody.

Deanna: 24:49

I want to remind you, if you're on a team and you do not feel valued, you currently do not have community safety, and this is something you need to think about. What is causing you to not feel valued? Is it other team members? Is it your lead? Or is it your own internal sense of self worth? Imposter syndrome is real, people. But you've got to think about it. Then try and work towards it. Have an honest conversation with people, which is really, really hard. If you don't feel comfortable having an honest conversation with the person who makes you devalued, have an honest conversation with somebody who can work as an intermediate.

Kara: 25:27

As an individual, when you come to a team, if you have baggage, if you have issues from your previous project, just personal things that you're dealing with or you have certain personality types you just typically don't gel with, it's good to come in with self awareness on that because it's going to impact whether or not the team can offer you community safety, but you also have to be willing to receive it.

Deanna: 25:51

I'm going to say we're done. Talk to you later.

Kara: 25:55

See you next week.