Virtual “Storming” How to Work through Tensions with New Teams - Nobl Academy

This resource first appeared in issue #66 on 20 Mar 2021 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Becoming A Manager: Remote, Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions

Virtual “Storming”: How to Work through Tensions with New Teams - Nobl Academy

A lot of heist movies have really clear depictions of Tuckman’s four stages of group development. Forming is the initial “the team is brought together” sequence, where a group of individuals comes together for a common (nefarious) purpose. After the initial honeymoon phase, when the hard work begins, comes the Storming phase - the individually brilliant but mismatched group initially has conflicts as they try to figure out how to work together. In the Norming phase, default solutions and workarounds to those conflicts start to emerge as “the way we get things done in this team”. And then there’s the performing phase, where those norms and the groups collection of individuals’ skills really starts to shine, and they start to deliver in a serious way on some high-performance larceny.

The key here is that the team has to go through the storming phase for the norms established in the next phase to be effective. And storming is harder to do constructively in distributed teams.

This blog post walks through some approaches

• Asynchronous documents about how people work best
• Facilitating debates about how to proceed when conflict does arrive
• Don’t necessarily feel the need to be an impartial referee - propose other solutions, participate in the discussions, creating “an environment where healthy dissent leads to progress”
• Disagree and commit
• Be self-aware
• Hold a retro - not on the decisions made (you don’t want to be constantly relitigating things) but on the process by which the team made them