May 15, 2025

Teams and team dynamics are some of the most interesting topics in leadership. But many leaders don’t understand what is happening in the teams during the team development and keep making changes to either the task, the relationships, or the structure of the team. Change just one of these, in any stage and you must go through the entire process again, beginning with “Forming.”
Why do we have to go all the way back to “Forming” and not just to the stage directly before it? Each change, either in task, relationship, or structure (or a combination of these) completely changes your team’s roles, status, composition, cohesion, and norms, also known as group structural dimensions, so it is like starting all over again, whether we like it or not. The goal with any team is to get to the “Performing Stage” as quickly as possible and stay there as long as possible. So, let’s look at how changing these three things, task, relationship, or structure can impact your team.

Task: Imagine that you and six other people are responsible for making all the primary parts for your company’s product known as “Gadgets.” You seven people have worked together for five years, the Gadgets are very popular, and sales are great. Now, the C.E.O. decides to expand production of Gadgets, so along with production of the Gadgets, you seven are now tasked with training 14 other people in how to make Gadgets. Will your production performance be the same? Has your task just changed? What can you predict about the productivity of the Gadgets initially? What has happened to your team based on the task of making Gadgets?

Relationship: Now consider what happens when two of the new employees your team has to train are the children of the C.E.O. because she wants her kids to learn the business “from the bottom, up!” What impact is that going to have on the group or team? What will that do to the norms of the team? How is their status any different than other team members? Does this impact the cohesion of the original team? Could it change the roles of the team members? What is the composition of the new team going to look like? Relationships, both positive and negative, have a huge impact on how the team operates and one change, a marriage, a divorce, dating, arguments, etc., may cause changes in a team and cause the team to have to go back to the beginning.

Structure: Structure in a team has a lot to do with the way the team communicates, the team member roles, the rules, policies, practices and norms in place, the level of cohesion, the goals and physical structure of time and place of the teams, etc. So, take the Gadget Scenario above, with twice as many new employees as there are now “veteran” Gadget makers, how many production teams are you going to have? Are you going to make team leaders to monitor training and performance on each team? Who will be the leaders of the new teams, does this change their status and role on the team? Do you need a more formalized chain of command between teams? Does the size of the team make a difference in the production of Gadgets? How will the teams communicate between each other? Any, and all of these structure issues will cause the team to have to go back to the “forming stage” and start over again.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER… If the goal of a team is to “perform,” and the leader’s goal is to get the team to the “performing stage” as quickly as possible, then knowing that changing any one of these three; task, relationship, or structure, can cause the team to go back to the “Forming Stage” is vitally important. The leader should look at each of these and anticipate the possible outcomes before changes are made, or at least work towards getting the team through each of the team development stages as quickly as possible to get them to “performing.” Remember, you don’t just go backwards to the previous stage, you go all the way back to the beginning and start over with each change.

Quotes to Put into Practice…
“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead, Cultural Anthropologist and Author
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
- Victor Frankl, Holocaust Survivor and Author