Quick Guide: Tuckman’s Five Stages
Tuckman’s model describes the phases most teams move through as they develop. Bruce Tuckman published the first four in 1965, and added the fifth with Mary Ann Jensen in 1977. Its value is diagnostic: knowing which stage a team is in tells you what kind of leadership it needs right now.
- Forming: Polite, tentative, reliant on the leader. People are working out what’s expected.
- Storming: Friction surfaces over roles, priorities, and how decisions get made. Uncomfortable and necessary.
- Norming: The group settles into working agreements and starts operating as a unit.
- Performing: High autonomy. The team handles its own disagreements and the leader can step back.
- Adjourning: The team disbands. Closure and recognition matter more than most leaders expect.
The most useful thing to know: teams don’t move through these in a straight line, and storming is the stage leaders most often try to skip. Rushing it doesn’t remove the conflict, it just defers it into something harder to address later.
Most people meet Tuckman’s model as a tidy diagram with five arrows, and take away roughly nothing they can use. That’s a shame, because the underlying observation is genuinely useful: teams behave predictably differently depending on how long they’ve been working together, and the leadership that helps at one stage actively hinders at another.
This guide covers what each stage actually looks like in practice, what a leader should do differently in each, how to tell where your team sits, and where the model breaks down. That last part matters, since it’s usually presented as settled fact and it isn’t quite.
Where the Model Came From
Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist, published “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups” in 1965, drawing on a review of studies of group behaviour. That paper set out four stages: forming, storming, norming, and performing. The fifth, adjourning, came later, added by Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen in 1977 after further review.
Sixty years on, it remains the most widely used framework for team development, largely because the pattern it describes is recognizable to anyone who has been part of a new team.
The Five Stages at a Glance
Here’s each stage, what it looks like from the inside, and what the team needs from whoever is leading it.
| Stage | What it looks like | What the leader should do | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forming | Polite, cautious, lots of questions directed at the leader. Little real disagreement. | Be directive. Give clear structure, roles, and purpose. | Mistaking politeness for alignment |
| Storming | Friction over roles, priorities, and decision rights. Frustration, sometimes withdrawal. | Surface the conflict and help the group work through it rather than around it. | Trying to skip it or smooth it over |
| Norming | Working agreements emerge. People know how the group operates and defer to each other’s strengths. | Make the norms explicit so they hold under pressure. | Letting harmony suppress useful dissent |
| Performing | The team runs itself, handles its own disagreements, and adapts without needing direction. | Delegate and get out of the way. Protect the team from disruption. | Staying too involved out of habit |
| Adjourning | Work winds down. A mix of pride and genuine loss, especially after intense projects. | Create proper closure. Recognize contributions and capture what was learned. | Letting the team dissolve without acknowledgement |
The “common mistake” column is where most of the practical value sits. Each stage has a characteristic way leaders get it wrong, and knowing yours is more useful than memorizing the sequence.
Team stuck somewhere it shouldn’t be? A facilitated session can surface what’s actually holding it there. Get in touch and tell us what you’re seeing.
Storming Is the Stage Everyone Tries to Skip
This is worth its own section, because it’s where most of the damage gets done.
Storming feels like failure. The team was getting along, now it isn’t, and the instinct for most leaders is to restore the peace as quickly as possible. So the disagreement gets smoothed over, the meeting moves on, and everyone agrees to a plan nobody actually supports.
The problem is that the conflict doesn’t disappear. It goes underground, and resurfaces later as stalled execution, passive resistance, or people quietly disengaging. A team that never storms properly tends to reach a version of norming that’s really just politeness, and it stays fragile under pressure.
Working through this stage takes some courage, both from the team and from whoever is leading it. The conversations are uncomfortable. But a team that has genuinely disagreed and found its way through comes out with something a team that avoided it never gets: the knowledge that it can handle disagreement without falling apart. That’s a large part of what psychological safety actually is in practice.
This is often when an outside facilitator earns their place. When a leader has a stake in the disagreement, they can’t credibly mediate it, and the team reads that. A neutral third party can name what’s happening in a way that doesn’t come across as taking sides. It’s also why conflict-heavy sessions are one of the clearer cases for bringing in a facilitator.
Teams Don’t Move in a Straight Line
The diagram suggests a one-way progression. Real teams move backwards regularly, and usually for ordinary reasons: a new member joins, a leader changes, priorities shift, or a reorganization lands. Any of those can push a performing team back into forming or storming almost overnight.
This isn’t a failure, and treating it as one makes it worse. The practical response is to recognize what’s happened and do the forming work again deliberately: re-establish roles, revisit working agreements, and give the group room to renegotiate how it operates now that the conditions have changed. Teams that do this openly recover far faster than teams that expect to carry on as though nothing shifted.
Where the Model Falls Short
It’s worth being honest about the limitations, because Tuckman is often presented with more authority than it warrants.
It’s descriptive, not prescriptive. The model tells you what tends to happen. It doesn’t tell you how to make it happen faster or better, and treating the stages as a checklist to complete misses the point.
The evidence base is narrower than its popularity suggests. Tuckman’s original work was a review of existing studies, many of them on therapy and training groups rather than workplace teams. It’s a useful lens, not a validated process model.
The stages blur. Real teams often show characteristics of two or three at once. Different sub-groups within a team can be in different places entirely.
It doesn’t account for modern working patterns. The model assumes a stable group working together over time. Cross-functional teams, project-based structures, and distributed teams all complicate that, and a team that reshapes every quarter never gets a clean run at the sequence.
None of this makes it useless. It makes it a diagnostic tool rather than a roadmap, which is how we use it: as a shared vocabulary for a team to talk about where it is and what it needs. Its value is that it gives people language for something they’re already experiencing.
Working Out Where Your Team Is
The fastest read comes from watching how disagreement gets handled. In forming, it barely appears. In storming, it appears and escalates. In norming, it appears and gets resolved by referring to how the group agreed to work. In performing, it appears and resolves so routinely that nobody flags it as conflict at all.
A second useful signal is what happens when the leader isn’t in the room. A forming team stalls without direction. A storming team fragments. A norming team keeps going but checks in. A performing team barely notices.
You can also just ask. Showing the team the model and asking where people think the group sits is often more accurate than a leader’s own assessment, and the conversation that follows tends to be more valuable than the answer. If you want to complement this with a view of how individuals within the team operate, our COMS communication styles assessment covers different ground, and the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team framework pairs well when trust is the sticking point.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the five stages of Tuckman’s model?
The five stages are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Forming is the polite, tentative early phase. Storming is when friction surfaces over roles and priorities. Norming is when working agreements settle and the group starts operating as a unit. Performing is high autonomy, where the team handles its own disagreements. Adjourning is the disbanding phase, where closure and recognition matter.
Who created Tuckman’s model and when?
Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist, published the first four stages in 1965 in a paper called “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups,” based on a review of existing studies of group behaviour. The fifth stage, adjourning, was added in 1977 by Tuckman with Mary Ann Jensen. The model remains the most widely used framework for describing team development.
Why is the storming stage important?
Storming is where a team works out its real roles, priorities, and decision rights, and skipping it means those questions stay unresolved. Leaders often try to smooth the conflict over because it feels like failure, but the disagreement doesn’t disappear. It resurfaces later as stalled execution or passive resistance. A team that works through storming properly gains something durable: the knowledge that it can disagree without falling apart.
How long does each stage last?
There’s no fixed timeline, and any source giving you specific durations is guessing. It depends on the team’s size, how often it works together, how high the stakes are, and how directly the group handles disagreement. Some teams move through forming in a week; others take months to genuinely reach norming. What matters more than speed is whether each stage was actually worked through rather than bypassed.
Can a team go backwards through the stages?
Yes, and it happens routinely. A new team member, a change of leader, a reorganization, or a shift in priorities can push a performing team back into forming or storming quickly. This isn’t a failure. The useful response is to name what’s happened and redo the forming work deliberately: re-establish roles, revisit working agreements, and give the group room to renegotiate how it operates under the new conditions.
How do I tell which stage my team is in?
Watch how disagreement gets handled. In forming it barely appears; in storming it appears and escalates; in norming it appears and gets resolved by referring to agreed ways of working; in performing it resolves so routinely nobody calls it conflict. Another signal is what happens when the leader is absent: a forming team stalls, a storming team fragments, a performing team barely notices. You can also show the team the model and ask them.
How should leadership change across the stages?
Be directive in forming, giving clear structure and roles. In storming, shift to surfacing and working through conflict rather than suppressing it. In norming, make the group’s working agreements explicit so they hold under pressure. In performing, delegate and step back, protecting the team from disruption rather than directing it. In adjourning, focus on closure and recognizing what people contributed.
Is Tuckman’s model still relevant?
It’s still useful, with caveats. The pattern it describes is recognizable to most people who’ve been on a new team, and it gives groups a shared vocabulary for talking about where they are. But it’s descriptive rather than prescriptive, its original evidence base was narrower than its popularity suggests, and it assumes a stable group working together over time, which fits project-based and cross-functional teams less well. Treat it as a diagnostic lens, not a roadmap.
Note: This reflects how we use Tuckman’s model when working with teams across Canada. It’s a lens for conversation rather than a diagnostic instrument, and every team’s path through the stages looks a little different.
Working With Positive Impact
Most teams don’t need a model explained to them. They need help with the part that’s actually hard, which is usually the storming they’ve been working around for months. We facilitate sessions for teams across Canada, in person and virtually, and we’re comfortable in the conversations that get avoided.
