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Getting a team of people to work together has been challenging . No significant job can be finished without a team of people working on it. But you're dealing with people and, as we are well aware, people don't always form into a team without some issues coming to the surface. So there have always been people who have studied how teams can be quickly brought up to speed, because team projects have often been public, expensive and high profile.

For the last 40 years one model of team development has been accepted in the West. It was first described in a literature study published by navy researcher Bruce Tuckman in 1965. In what was to become a seminal piece of research he described four stages of a team's life: forming, storming, norming and performing.

Researchers now widely agree that Tuckman's four stages make sense. Team members do indeed seem to want to learn about the others, need to make changes to accommodate each other, strike up conflict, and (in many cases) eventually work together "as a team".

Dr Tuckman called his first stage "Forming"

When a team begins to work, even if the group is older and many of the members are new, the group will often take time getting to know members and team rules, and almost every time members will depend on each other or what the group did in the past.

Then the Storming begins.

Perfect name for this time of conflict when team members don't like being told what to do by the others in the group.

However, the conflict leads to a third stage, which Tuckman called Norming.

This is a time for people to say how they feel and what they think. The team becomes a definite unit. New ways of acting and interacting together are accepted.

Which makes possible the final stage in Tuckman's list: Performing.

This is the time supervisors dream about. Team members understand each other and working together is easy. People co-operate to get jobs finished, to the extent of doing work for the others where that's going to be helpful. The team leader will be unchallenged and members look out for each other's interests.

Tuckman took his research further. A few years later he inserted a stage five and others debated and refined his findings. But in spite of this, Tuckman's clear outline of the study of his day, and his catchy descriptors, have stayed around and right up until now are the basis of what we know about how teams work.

This Anger Management article is provided by Articleteller - The Free Article Directory http://www.articleteller.com

Len McGrane has written widely on corporate team building programs and teambuilding ideas. He recommends this team building web site for programs www.teamworx.cc

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