Regression Is the Signal

Claire Monroe

Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Claire Monroe, here with Edwin Carrington. Edwin, today I want to take on a model that almost every manager has seen on a slide at some point: forming, storming, norming, performing. Bruce Tuckman introduced it in 1965 in a paper called Developmental Sequence in Small Groups, and in 1977 he and Mary Ann Jensen added a fifth stage, adjourning. It's probably the most famous team model in management. And I think most of us use it wrong.

Edwin Carrington

I agree, Claire. The model itself holds up well. The mistake is how leaders picture it. They picture a staircase. You climb from forming to performing, you arrive, and you stay there. So when a performing team suddenly starts arguing again, the leader concludes something has broken.

Claire Monroe

And hasn't it? If my team was humming along and now there's friction in every meeting, that feels like going backwards.

Edwin Carrington

It is going backwards. That's the point. Teams don't move through the stages in a straight line. They move in loops. A new hire, a new leader, a change in goals, and even a team that was performing beautifully will drop back into storming. The regression isn't the failure. The regression is information.

Claire Monroe

Let me push on that a little, because the research isn't completely kind to Tuckman. Connie Gersick published a study in the Academy of Management Journal in 1988 where she followed real project teams, and she didn't find a neat sequence at all. What she found was that teams tended to settle into a pattern early, stick with it, and then go through a burst of change right around the midpoint of their deadline.

Edwin Carrington

Gersick's work is a good challenge, and I'd say it strengthens the point rather than weakening it. Whether you use Tuckman's language or Gersick's, the conclusion is the same: team development is not a one-time climb. Teams shift when something forces them to renegotiate how they work. The stages are states a team moves in and out of, not steps it completes.

Claire Monroe

So the useful question isn't what stage are we in. It's what just changed.

Edwin Carrington

That's exactly the question. Regression always has a cause. Find the cause and you've found the thing you need to lead.

Claire Monroe

Let's take the most common trigger. You add one person to a team of six that's performing well. Why would one hire pull the whole group back into storming?

Edwin Carrington

Because a performing team runs on agreements nobody wrote down. Who speaks first in a meeting. How fast decisions get made. How much detail someone needs before they'll commit. Those norms were negotiated over months, mostly without anyone noticing. A new person hasn't agreed to any of them. So the team has to renegotiate, out loud this time, and that renegotiation looks like conflict.

Claire Monroe

And the new person often gets blamed for it.

Edwin Carrington

Almost always. The leader sees friction start the week the new hire arrives and draws the obvious conclusion. Sometimes that's right. But often the new person is simply wired differently from the rest of the group, and that difference was always going to surface. The mistake is either blaming the individual or telling everyone to be nice and move on.

Claire Monroe

What's wrong with telling everyone to move on? That sounds like normal management.

Edwin Carrington

Suppressed conflict doesn't disappear, Claire. It resurfaces later as resistance or as turnover. Storming is where a team works out how it will actually operate. If you skip it, you haven't avoided the conflict. You've postponed it and made it more expensive.

Claire Monroe

So what does a leader do differently in each stage?

Edwin Carrington

In forming, give structure: purpose, roles, a working charter and a meeting rhythm. Don't assume a new group will organize itself. In storming, give the conflict a process, a clear way to make decisions and regular retrospectives, so disagreement has somewhere productive to go. In norming, revisit the agreements the team has made, and protect the quieter voices so the loudest person doesn't set every norm. And in performing, delegate and protect the team's focus.

Claire Monroe

The part I find hard is seeing the clash coming. By the time you notice storming, it's already in the standup.

Edwin Carrington

That's where behavioral data earns its place. OAD measures behavioral drive across five dimensions: Drive, Influence, Resilience, Structure and Leadership. When you can see how each person is wired to operate under pressure, you can see where two working styles are likely to clash before the storming starts. It also gives a team a shared vocabulary for why someone works the way they do, which makes norming faster and far less personal. OAD's Team Variance Report turns that into a team-level view instead of an individual one.

Claire Monroe

So instead of the new hire being the problem, the team can say, we're high on Structure, she's high on Drive, and that's why this handoff feels tense.

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. A named difference can be managed. An unnamed one gets turned into a story about someone's character.

Claire Monroe

And what about performing teams? How do you know one is slipping?

Edwin Carrington

Drift shows up in engagement before it shows up in a missed deadline. People go quieter, handoffs get slower, fewer ideas come up in meetings. By the time the number is missed, the team has usually been drifting for a while. OAD's Performance Drift Detection, which is coming to the platform, is built to catch that window.

Claire Monroe

I want to come back to that fifth stage, adjourning, because I think it's the one nobody actually does. The project ships, everyone is exhausted, and the team just dissolves into the next thing.

Edwin Carrington

It is the most skipped stage, and one of the most costly to skip. Adjourning means three things: run a real retrospective, document the decisions and why you made them, and publicly recognize the work. Skip those and the next team pays for it. They make the same mistakes, rediscover the same shortcuts and rebuild knowledge that walked out the door.

Claire Monroe

And it's not only project teams, right? When a key person leaves a permanent team, that's a kind of adjourning too.

Edwin Carrington

That's a sharp connection, Claire. Every departure is a small adjourning, and every arrival is a small forming. Put those together and you see the full loop. A performing team loses one person and gains another, and it's back in storming. The leaders who handle this well don't fight the loop. They expect it, name it and lead each stage on purpose.

Claire Monroe

So the real skill isn't getting a team to performing. It's getting it back there, again and again, faster each time.

Edwin Carrington

That's the whole job. Regression isn't a sign you've failed as a leader. Being surprised by it is.

Claire Monroe

If you want to see how your own people are wired before the next change hits your team, start with the person you trust most. OAD's free Top Performer Profile takes seven minutes, results come back in twenty-four hours, and there's no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.

Edwin Carrington

A team is never finished, Claire. The good ones simply learn to find their way back.

Claire Monroe

Perfect place to leave it. Thanks for the wisdom, Edwin.

Edwin Carrington

Always a pleasure, Claire.