Expectations are high for leaders at Seattle City Light. The utility’s Leadership Commitment statement specifies six key behaviors leaders are expected to practice:
- We will give employees ownership
- We will ask for and be open to employee’s feedback
- We will give employees feedback regularly and skillfully
- We will build relationships with our employees
- We will communicate effectively and transparently to our employees
- We will provide employees with recognition and appreciation.
As you learn about leaders’ roles at each state of team development, consider these tenets to enhance your understanding and reinforce your own responsibilities and commitments.
Tuckman’s influential work on stages, interactions, and functioning of groups includes Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. Each stage identifies a progression with a group. While Tuckman’s model focuses on what’s happening within the team, leaders have important roles during each stage of group development to guide groups through the phases effectively.
Forming – Director
Identify purpose of group, agree on norms or rules of engagement, set expectations, create structured meetings, focus on team objectives, keep group on target, build comfort
Storming – Coach
Reinforce purpose of group and norms or rules of engagement, listen to people’s input, coach group members on best way to function as a team, help group members learn and apply conflict resolution skills, encourage functional conflict/conflict resolution
Norming – Collaborator
Focus on delegating responsibilities, build team members’ confidence, involve team in problem solving and high-level decisions, challenge team’s thinking to avoid groupthink
Performing – Visionary
Reinforce purpose, norms and goals, look to outside trends, focus on continuous improvement and growth, emphasize idea generation, analyze feedback data and performance indicators to keep team’s performance up
Source: Tuckman, Bruce W (1965). “Developmental sequence in small groups.” Psychological Bulletin.