Getting a new team to fire on all cylinders...

New teams often start out pleasant rather than productive. People are careful, courteous, and reluctant to challenge one another—especially when they’re still working out the unwritten rules. To a lay observer, this can look like harmony; in reality it can become polite conformity, where meetings feel smooth but priorities remain fuzzy, decisions drift, and important tensions stay unspoken.

A helpful way to understand what’s happening is Tuckman’s stages of group development. Tuckman proposed that teams typically progress through predictable phases as they learn how to work together: Forming (orientation and caution), Storming (friction and negotiation of differences), Norming (shared ways of working), and later Performing (effective, flexible collaboration) (Tuckman, 1965). The stages aren’t a tidy straight line—teams can loop back during change—but the model gives leaders a simple map: early discomfort is often not failure, it’s development.

This is where team coaching can help a newly formed team “fire on all cylinders” sooner. Coaching creates a structured space for the conversations teams tend to postpone—so they can translate goodwill into clarity, commitment, and momentum. Evidence on workplace coaching shows positive effects on performance-related outcomes, and team-focused coaching is particularly useful when it improves the quality of collective sense-making and follow-through (Cannon-Bowers et al., 2023).

In Forming, the leader’s job is to replace ambiguity with shared understanding—without over-controlling. The team needs a compelling direction (what we’re here to achieve and why it matters), clear roles and decision rights, and explicit permission to ask “basic” questions. This is also the moment to establish psychological safety—not as a slogan, but as the practical expectation that people can raise concerns, challenge assumptions, and admit uncertainty without punishment. Psychological safety supports learning behaviour in teams, which is essential when a team is still finding its feet (Edmondson, 1999).

If Forming is about alignment, Storming is about honesty. Differences surface—about standards, pace, influence, and what “good” looks like. High-performing teams don’t avoid Storming; they learn to use it well. Leaders can accelerate progress by naming the stage as normal, keeping disagreement focused on ideas and trade-offs, and building brief moments of reflection that turn friction into learning. Research indicates team reflexivity—pausing to review goals, processes, and relationships—is associated with better performance (Leblanc et al., 2024).

Done consistently, this moves the team into Norming, where shared habits stabilise coordination and accountability—creating the platform for truly successful performance.

References

Cannon-Bowers, J. A., Bowers, C., & Salas, E. (2023). Workplace coaching: A meta-analysis and recommendations for future research. Frontiers in Psychology.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Leblanc, P. M., et al. (2024). A meta-analysis of team reflexivity: Antecedents, outcomes, and boundary conditions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399.