Why It's Normal to Feel Like You're Not Quite There as a Team

If you could mind-read a senior leadership team, maybe 30 minutes into a difficult exec meeting, one thing you’d likely hear them asking is: “What is wrong with us!?”

And if you kept listening, you’d hear each of them holding an inner-voice running commentary on everyone else. That one’s being annoying. That one isn’t paying attention. That one is slippery-shouldered, and that one is cryptic in what they say. That one is way off-piste on what matters. And that one is forever vaguely threatening to use some power they hold, whether it’s position, knowledge or relationships, against the rest of us. All of them thinking it at the same time, and each appearing somewhere on somebody else’s list.

If you could see them sitting around that board table at a tough point in their decision-making, you might notice them thinking: “Why is this still happening to us?”, or, “Why are we still not good at being a team?”

What nobody says out loud is that each of them is holding a private sense of being somehow inadequate at this, or of being on a team composed of people who so often just seem wrong. That their team muddles through, but is a poor outlier really. And because none of them says it, none of them finds out that everybody else is thinking it too.

The Mythical Team

The standard they are failing against is the mythical team that has this handled. Not one they have ever been on, or even seen. Most of them have left a previous team over exactly these kinds of issues, and joined this one hoping it would be different. Somewhere, though, surely there must be a team where it all works?

I’d like to hire one of those planes that pull a banner, or write in the sky, and have it say:

THIS IS NORMAL • EVERY TEAM FEELS LIKE THIS • THERE’S A REASON IT HAPPENS • YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT

Which would be quite a long banner.

But one thing you can easily present in a team development session is Tuckman’s model. You know this one – Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing. Put that up and all the HR people will sit back, happy that you’re not going to disrupt anything.

Back We Go

What I’ve watched happen over and over is teams arriving back where they started. A team that had got itself into something like Performing, humming along, finds itself in a Storm again. Arguing (or avoiding conflict), annoyed with each other, feeling like there’s something wrong with them, and each of them thinking they’re the only team like this.

Susan Wheelan’s later research, which builds directly on Tuckman, shows that this is what teams do. They go back to earlier stages when their issues (more about those later) are unresolved. And development happens in a one step forward, two steps backward kind of way.(1)

I like Tuckman because of what’s implicit in it, not because of what it was intended to do. What I like is that if it’s true that teams develop in those stages, then it also makes sense to me that teams would regress in those stages too. Wheelan found exactly that.

Which is why Tuckman and Wheelan are still worth talking about, as a kind of map that tells you where you are when you find yourself back there.

What Sends You Back

I have my own view of what the causes of those ‘issues’ might be. And why so much of what happens for senior leadership teams will be bumping them back down the development stages, straight into a storm. I think it’s a long list, but if I had to summarise them, it would be into three groups of stressors, clustered around:

Team membership – who’s in, who does what, who liaises with whom, who controls what. A new CFO joins without any of the unspoken understanding of what is what: who defers to whom, which arguments are already finished. You can’t pick that up in an induction, however good the person. Your team will go back to the Stormingphase to resolve it
Team goals and objectives – what’s the latest priority, what’s slipping, where is the agenda coming from, what’s driving the focus
Team operating environment – all the usual PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) stuff, plus the layer above the team, owners, investors, NEDs, plus the layer below including all their direct reports.

Phew!

Any and all of those types of change load the team up with issues they haven’t yet resolved and so, as Tuckman/Wheelan show us, there you are, back at the Storming stage.

It happens a lot more than you might think, because of a lot more causes. So much so, that I think we should regard it as a regular occurrence. You’re not a dysfunctional team. There’s nothing wrong with you. And you’re not abnormal.

But, you are likely to find yourselves quite often in a situation where the team isn’t flying along nicely, where everything is not humming away in functional harmony.

If you’re the kind of team who wants to do something about that, who wants to get to Performing faster, or know how to recognise and get out of Storming with greater regularity, I’ve got two more things to point you towards.

Deliberate Attention

First is that the senior leadership teams I see who are best at this kind of development, make a conscious choice to put at least part of their collective attention on to the issue of how well they are functioning as a team.

Most teams don’t do this, which is partly why they have that unconscious worry about being mediocre. But there are also good reasons why they don’t do it, including that it can be risky. If you want to know more about why that is and how to do your team development safely, take a look at this article of mine https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-senior-teams-avoid-conflict-how-everything-changes-nick-robinson-4mlce/

Persistence

Like everything worthwhile, the need to do this kind of team development work does not go away. It’s like going to the gym, eating healthily, staying married. The effort is day-to-day, repetition, not giving up and staying in the game.

Real-life persistence is messy. It involves tiredness, fear, frustration, annoyance, doubt. And above all, a small daily refusal to give up.

I have been coaching like this for a long time now. I have watched teams heading back into Tuckman’s Storm, helped them get past it, and then seen them go through it again when something else around them changes. It is the most ordinary thing in this work.

It will happen to your team, probably sooner than you expect.

What separates the teams who handle it from the ones who don’t, and who go on suffering for it, is not whether they end up back in the Storm. It is whether they can look at each other and say, here we are again, right, what do we need to sort out this time. And do it with sleeves rolled up and something close to enjoyment. That is the answer to the unspoken question, “What is wrong with us?” Nothing is. You’re a team, and this is what teams do.

More Support and Resources

I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together. My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation is clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership, and better performance.

Why It’s Normal to Feel Like You’re Not Quite There as a Team