If you’re in and out of new teams all the time, you can’t afford to wait for each team’s development to take its own sweet time.

If you’re in a competitive or disruptive business, you can’t settle for comfortable risk-averse norms that compromise, rather than optimize, performance.

If you’re an innovator with channel partners, manufacturing partners or development partners – inside or outside your enterprise – you have to form, storm and norm so partners buy into your values and do their part to strengthen your culture and brand.

If you’re selling to enterprise customers, every bizdev proposal is a team effort – where you can shape the team’s culture to accelerate adoption, or be a victim of a culture that chooses comfort over succcess.

For decades, anyone who’s studied business psychology has known the 4 stages of team development. We know that teams have to form before they storm, storm before they norm, and norm before they iron out how we work together and perform. Until the team comes together, we feel each other out. Inevitably, we step on a few toes and recover from misread cues and dropped balls, until we get the gears to mesh and anticipate each other’s moves. (If forming, storming, norming + performing isn’t a team development cycle you’ve seen before, click here for a description of these 4 stages of group development.)

It takes courage for leaders to step up and accelerate the 4 stages of development, rather than stand back and wait for the pieces to fall into place. And it takes courage to storm and norm in a way that lifts teams out of risk-averse traps – rather than indulging, compromising or appeasing team members who are more comfortable staying stuck in “how I do my thing” rather than doing what diverse teams need to achieve optimal performance.

When you show up in new groups, how do you learn to do team development faster and better? How do you cycle through the forming, storming and norming stages with habits that equip your group for peak performing, so you optimize rather than compromise results? And so you drive adoption and create demand, rather than waiting until partners are ready to ask you to fulfill demand?

The answer to “how” is simple – Practice. With feedback, coaching and the opportunity to practice again. Starting with groups that are easy to mobilize and with problems that have a simple obvious solution. And ramping up to team challenges that require creative and strategic thinking in VUCA conditions (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Adversity).

That’s where simulations like Towers Templars + Khanim and Haida Gwaii Hunt come in. They give your teams practice, in moderately difficult situations, where there’s Volatility Uncertainty Complexity and Adversity to overcome, so you form, storm, norm and perform with optimal rather than risk-averse outcomes.

In Towers Templars Khanim or Haida Gwaii Hunt, most groups are startled when they’re given the green light and told to “Go!” They’re painfully aware – they don’t know the answers and they don’t immediately know who to ask for help with the answers. If someone steps up and says, “I know what it takes to win,” they’re grateful that someone seemed to crack the code. They think they’re being team players when they ask, “How can I help?” – rather than asking “Does this make sense?”

Most teams have to form, storm, norm and then perform in time-pressured, resource-constrained conditions. Most find goals are ambiguous or even ill-defined – and have to be adjusted. Most get way too much (or too little) predigested information, or problems that don’t have an obvious simple solution. In matrix structures and cross-functional teams, authority lines are blurred, so it isn’t clear who’s leading and who’s following. With diversity and inclusion, some alien teammates rub each other the wrong way or commit faux pas that have to be smoothed over.

That’s true for teams of advisors who have to accelerate project initiation – before diving into their SOW. It’s true for DD teams and investment committees, always forming with new SMEs and analysts. It’s true for corporations that charter matrix organizations to seize cross-functional and cross-LOB opportunities. And for enterpreneurial upstarts who rely on an array of outsource providers and channel partners to do bigger things than they could accomplish on their own.

Fortunately, the courage to form-storm-norm-perform optimally isn’t a magical force that “just happens” and lifts you on its pegasus wings. It’s a skill – that you can learn and refine, with practice, and that you can make contagious. It’s not confined to a level of the organizational hierarchy, to a specific personality, to a generation or lifestyle or to a profession. Almost anyone can step up, take charge, lead from the middle and make courage contagious. And almost anyone can diminish the courage that others are trying to build.

With practice – and a few iterations of the simulation – leaders learn the 5 As and apply them in rapid-fire succession, as conditions change, to…

  • ASK openly – forming with the right diverse talent in the group, included (and empowered) to cull through the data, vet opportunities and set direction
  • AIM high – storming while there’s a bit of chaos and while diverse interests argue which goals should have hegemony and which should enable, rather than steer the bus
  • ALIGN interests – with trust and mutuality to seek win-win-win trade-offs, rather than settling for win-win compromises
  • ADHERE to disciplines and protocols – that equip the team to make good crisp time-efficient hand-offs; and, through it all
  • AROUSE passion, urgency, a can-do attitude, engagement and vitality so that VUCA adversities build pride and resilience rather than fear, defeatism or apathy

In our research and practical experience, we’ve seen these 5 As mobilize teams to produce incredible results. We’ve seen them create great trust, loyalty, camaraderie, engagement. And prevent mistakes. We look forward to seeing you lift your game and form-storm-norm-perform even more effectively, as you scale and as your growth opportunities and challenges get more and more complex.

——————————————

Courage Growth Partners Principals Dr Merom Klein + Dr Louise Yochee Klein say that an entrepreneurial leader’s most important competency is Making Courage Contagious – so development partners reimagine what is possible and so users and buyers embrace new standards of care based on solid proof and logic, not just precedent and herd mentalities.