7 Summary

This week you have learned about Tuckman’s work that identified five stages encompassing the life of a team. You have seen that in the ideal case, these stages can be correlated with increasing cohesion and competence on the part of the team. This is represented graphically in the S-curve of Lipnack and Stamp (2000). Real teams often depart from this ideal, with many going intermittently backwards as well as forwards. Some, alas, never reach a happy conclusion.

You have reflected on your own team’s position on the S-curve and considered how to solve the problems that may arise at each stage, so that you can improve your chances of completing the traverse of the S-curve and finishing the task successfully.

You should now be able to:

• define Tuckman’s stages of team development
• understand why it is helpful to identify the stages of team development
• apply Tuckman’s model to your own experiences of teamwork
• consider what you can do to help a team successfully navigate each of the stages.

Now that you have a better understanding of how teams develop as a whole, Week 4 will take you through the different roles people play within a team and how an individual with different strengths and weaknesses might contribute to that overall team context.

You can now go to Week 4.