In our previous article, The Tuckman Frustration, we introduced what we consider to be a growing phenomenon in modern organisations: teams repeatedly cycling between Forming and Storming but struggling to make it to Norming or Performing.
In a setting shaped by volatility, rapid change, and shifting team structures, business teams are finding themselves in a frustrating loop of introductions, misalignments, and unresolved tensions.
But awareness is only the first step.
What can leaders actually do when they recognise that their team is stuck in this loop?
This article offers a practical framework to help leaders address the root causes of the Forming/Storming loop and guide their teams toward stability, trust, and performance – even in chaotic conditions.
Contents
- First, Name the Pattern
- Understand What Keeps the Loop in Place
- Five Moves to Break the Loop
- Final Thought: Leadership is Re-Forming
If you prefer to listen instead, here is a short, AI-generated Deep Dive conversation that draws together the key points of this article. It’s not a verbatim transcription; more an exploration of themes, just in a different format.
First, Name the Pattern
One of the most powerful things a leader can do is simply name what’s happening. When a team has changed composition three times in six months, is dealing with conflicting priorities, or is still debating basic roles and responsibilities, calling out The Tuckman Frustration gives people a shared vocabulary for what they’re experiencing.
Try saying:
“We’ve been through a lot of change, and I think we’re caught in a Forming/Storming loop. Let’s pause and address what’s getting in the way of us moving forward as a team.”
Naming the pattern moves the problem from personal (“Why can’t we get it together?”) to systemic (“Ah, this is a known pattern – we can work with it”).
Understand What Keeps the Loop in Place
To move forward, you need to understand what’s anchoring the team in early-stage behaviours. Common causes include:
- Unclear purpose or shifting priorities
- Unspoken tensions or interpersonal misalignment
- Lack of shared working agreements
- New joiners disrupting existing dynamics
- Psychological safety gaps
Five Moves to Break the Loop
Here are five evidence-informed leadership practices to help shift the team dynamic:
1. Re-contract the Team – Not Just the Individuals
When teams change (even slightly), leaders often address it through one-on-one alignment. That’s necessary – but insufficient. What’s missing is a collective (re)contracting: a moment to pause, discuss expectations, reset behaviours, and agree on how to work together going forward.
Prompt questions to ask:
- What’s our shared purpose, and has it changed?
- What do we each need from this team to do our best work?
- What behaviours do we want to promote – and avoid?
This doesn’t need to be a two-day offsite. A 90-minute facilitated session, done well, can surface and resolve the tensions holding a team in Storming.
2. Work In the Team, Not Just On the Work
In the rush to deliver, it’s tempting to prioritise task over team. But if all your meetings are transactional, the relational work gets neglected – and it’s that relational fabric that enables performance in the long run.
As Ruth Wageman notes in her team effectiveness research, high-performing teams invest time in how they work together, not just what they produce.
Try this:
Start each team meeting with a short check-in – no more than 10 minutes – where people can share what’s on their mind or what they need from the group.
End meetings with a one-word reflection: How did we show up as a team today?
It’s small habits like this that shift culture.
3. Design for Adaptability, Not Stability
If your team is operating in a rapidly evolving, uncertain environment, the goal cannot be perfect alignment once and for all – instead, it should be building the muscles to realign rapidly as change comes.
It is often beneficial to create lightweight “Team Resilience Protocols” that help the group navigate inevitable changes. These might include:
- A shared method for rapidly onboarding new team members
- A default plan for redistributing roles when people leave
- A way to revisit goals when strategy shifts mid-quarter
As General Stan McChrystal argues in Team of Teams, adaptability is not a luxury – it’s the only path to sustained performance in complex systems.
4. Prioritise Psychological Safety Over Forced Harmony
It’s tempting to rush the team into agreement – especially when people are tired of conflict. But real cohesion comes from candour, not compliance.
According to Amy Edmondson, leaders build psychological safety by modelling fallibility, inviting input, and responding constructively to dissent.
Try this:
Make it a norm to say “What’s the thing we’re not saying?” in meetings.
Rotate the role of ‘devil’s advocate’ to legitimise challenge. Celebrate disagreement when it helps move the team forward.
Remember: the absence of conflict is not peace – it’s silence.
5. Clarify What Performing Looks Like Now
In fast-moving contexts, ‘Performing’ may not mean sustained high output over a long period – it may mean delivering well together for a short, intense burst, and then regrouping. Teams can’t live in peak performance. But they can develop patterns of micro-performance: clarity, focus, and collaboration in bursts.
Ask the team:
- What does great performance look like this month?
- What gets in the way of that right now?
- How will we know if we’re making progress?
Shorter performance cycles with regular reflection points help the team feel momentum, even when the wider context is shifting.
Final Thought: Leadership is Re-Forming
The heart of this challenge is that modern business leadership is not about guiding a team through a linear journey – it’s about continually re-forming the team in response to disruption.
If your team feels stuck in Forming/Storming, that’s not a failure – it’s a reflection of the world we’re in. The job of a leader is not to pretend that things are stable. It’s to build the routines, relationships, and resilience that allow the team to make progress anyway.
As we said in The Tuckman Frustration, Tuckman’s model still has immense value – but only when we pair it with an understanding of the adaptive challenges facing today’s teams.
My sense is that leadership now isn’t about navigating by the old maps. It’s about reading the landscape in real time – and helping your team do the same.
If you would like to know more about how we help leaders and teams create behavioural strategies to address the Tuckman Frustration, just reach out and we can talk it through…
