The Stages Of A Team

Stages of a Team
As a professional in Corporate America, working as part of a team, or leading a team is inevitable. Many great accomplishments come from teams. Establishing a team and understanding the stages of their development is necessary for a leader. The stages of team development are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning (Gibson, Ivancevich, Donnelly, & Konopeske, 2009). This paper explores these five development stages to the experience of the team effort assigned to resolve the printing problem at Children’s Hospital Colorado.
Working in a Group
While I worked in the Information Technology department at the Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colorado, I was asked by my boss to take over a technical issue from my peer, and lead a team of employees to resolve a problem. The issue was printing throughout the hospital was not reliable, and the physicians and clinical staff were frustrated as they had sporadic problems printing paperwork, prescriptions, and patient handout information. Another director managed printing, and she had not addressed the problem for over six months. This issue continued to escalate to the point that the Chief Medical Director of Research threatened to hire an outside company to fix the problem. I knew this would be a politically charged project, and there would also be some animosity from the team that did not address the problem. I was prepared for the five stages of a team; however, some were not as easy as others.
The first stage of my team development was the forming stage, which is when teams begin to break the ice, they try out new behaviors, and the team members get to know each other (Gibson, Ivancevich, Donnelly, & Konopeske, 2009). This was a sensitive ...

... middle of paper ...

...They learned how to work together as a team, and how to share ideas and think outside of the box. As the leader of the entire effort, I also met with the team members who did not stay involved with the team to understand what could the team or I have done different to make them feel closeness or cohesiveness with the others.
Conclusion
When teams are pulled together to resolve a problem, they need to learn how to work with each other to ensure they can perform effectively. To help the team be successful, leaders should understand the five stages of developing a team. The stages of team development are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning (Gibson, Ivancevich, Donnelly, & Konopeske, 2009). Resolving the printing problem at Children’s Hospital Colorado was successful because of the developed team, their cohesiveness, and their performance.