Stages of Developing a Team

One room, one pencil, four people, 25 minutes and 100 questions in a packet is a daunting test of collaboration and teamwork. Who gets to be the leader, the controller of the pencil? Why should any of the other team members listen to this person? Which questions should be answered and how should time be managed? These are just a few of the questions my team faced during our mission to complete as many questions as possible in the allowed time frame. In this reflection, I shall analyze how my team navigated through the five stages of team development, conflicts that arose in the process as well as the efficiency model we enabled and the task execution strategy we adopted to improve our team effectiveness.
As soon as the four members of my team entered the breakout room, we had begun the stages of team development. As Bruce Tuckman (1965) observed in his research, teams often undergo a five-stage process of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. During my team’s forming stage, we defined what our objective was and planned a general outline of how this was to be accomplished. Because we didn’t know each other very well, a quick introduction was given so we could get to know each other a little better. Next, we had a brief stage of storming which caused a bit of inefficiency. This was our initial five minutes of confusion due to not knowing each other’s strengths and who was better suited to answer which question. Our norming and performing stages melted together as we quickly gained our footing on the task at hand and settled for an execution strategy which would allow us to perform at a fairly efficient speed. Our performing stage was very encouraging and helped the team push through the questions...

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...ot at one time. This slowed the task process down because it mitigated the rate at which answers could be written. The obvious solution to this scenario would be to have more pencils which would increase efficiency by almost four times the original. Utilizing an efficiency model and adopting an execution strategy really enhanced our team effectiveness through the course of our test.
In conclusion, by going through the five stages of team development, resolving the conflicts along the way and utilizing an efficiency model along with an execution strategy, my team effectively completed the task we were assigned as well as gained plenty of team experience for use in our future projects. My team now knows each other’s strengths and weaknesses much better and will definitely utilize this knowledge to further enhance our team’s efficiency and effectiveness in the future.