Imagine you are hiking deep in the wilderness. The trees are thick, the ground is rocky, and it is easy to get lost. Smart hikers before you figured out a simple trick: they stack piles of rocks called cairns to mark the path. If you see a cairn, you know you are heading in the right direction.
In a workplace, teams go through a journey that is a lot like hiking a mountain. Bruce Tuckman, a famous psychologist, identified what has become known as the Tuckman stages of team development. His model describes five stages that teams often move through as they work together: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Just like hikers need trail markers, teams need cairns at every step of their climb so they don’t wander off-route.
This model provides leaders with a useful framework for understanding team development, but it is not a rigid map. Organizations are never a single, neat line on a map. Real terrain is messy. Different departments, functional areas, and project teams across an enterprise are almost always at entirely different stages of the climb at any given moment. One division might be struggling through rocky disagreements while another is flying high on a plateau, and a third is just stepping onto the trailhead. That is completely normal.
The real test of team leadership is recognizing that the organizational universe isn’t linear, anticipating what each unique group needs next, and taking action before friction turns into a fall. Effective leaders understand that team building is not simply about getting people together and hoping they develop good working relationships. It requires attention to where the team is on the trail and what kind of leadership it needs at that particular point in the journey.
By staying ahead of the terrain, leaders ensure there is no loss of quality and no nasty surprises for employees or customers, no matter which part of the mountain they happen to be navigating. This is the essence of effective team leadership: knowing where the team is, understanding what it needs, and creating the conditions for strong team performance.
1. The Trailhead: Forming a New Team
At the very beginning of a hike, everyone is excited, but also a little nervous and confused. No one knows where the trail starts or who is carrying the map. Leaders need to build a clear trailhead cairn right at the start by spelling out the team’s mission, expectations, and rules right away so nobody starts the journey guessing.
The forming stage is where relationships begin, roles start to take shape, and team members try to understand what will be expected of them. This is an important point in leadership development, because the behaviors leaders establish at the beginning can influence how the team operates throughout the rest of its journey.
- Public Agencies: The trailhead often starts with rigid civil service mandates, strict policy manuals, and compliance checkboxes. The challenge is ensuring new personnel understand the legislative intent behind their public service mandate, rather than just drowning in bureaucratic red tape from day one.
- Non-Profits: Teams here usually launch with intense shared passion for a mission, but they often lack formal onboarding structures. Founders or directors must build a cairn that balances emotional dedication with operational clarity so well-meaning volunteers don’t burn out immediately.
- For-Profits: The starting line is driven by market pressures, revenue targets, and immediate performance metrics. Supervisors must establish clear performance baselines quickly to prevent the team from scattering in different commercial directions.
2. The First Ridge: Storming and Managing Conflict
Soon, the fun wears off. The hill gets steep, people get tired, and hikers start bumping into each other. Arguments happen, and people disagree on the best way forward. When a team is fighting, they need a boundary marker that keeps everyone safe. Good leaders set rules for handling arguments and disagreements before the storm hits, reminding the team that friction is part of the climb rather than an excuse to tear each other down.
The storming stage can be uncomfortable, but it is also an important part of healthy team development. Differences in personalities, priorities, experience, expectations, and approaches to work begin to surface. The goal isn’t to eliminate disagreement. It is to teach the team how to disagree productively.
- Public Agencies: Friction often arises between career bureaucrats protecting institutional stability and incoming reformers or political appointees pushing for rapid change. Leaders must build boundary markers that protect constructive policy debate without violating administrative code.
- Non-Profits: Storming in non-profits frequently exposes deep ideological differences about how to serve the mission, often complicated by scarce financial resources. Staff and boards must learn to navigate intense philosophical disagreements without letting mission drift tear the organization apart.
- For-Profits: Commercial storming usually revolves around competing egos, resource allocation, and differing tactical ideas for hitting sales or product goals. Supervisors need to channel that competitive energy into problem-solving instead of destructive office politics.
The quality of organizational leadership becomes particularly visible during this stage. Leaders who understand that conflict can be a natural part of team development can help people navigate disagreement without allowing it to become destructive.
3. Finding the Rhythm: Norming and Building Team Trust
Once the team gets past the fighting, they find their groove. People figure out their jobs, trust builds, and walking together feels a lot easier. This is the stage where the team writes down their best habits and standard operating rules that show what works. When team members help build these rules themselves, they take pride in them and make it much easier for new people to join later without tripping over old habits.
During norming, the team begins establishing shared expectations, behaviors, and routines. This is where team building becomes less about bringing people together and more about creating a reliable way for them to work together.
- Public Agencies: Norming takes the form of standardized operating procedures (SOPs) and inter-agency handoffs. Because public sector turnover can disrupt institutional knowledge, these written cairns are critical for maintaining continuity across changing political administrations.
- Non-Profits: Teams settle into recurring rhythms around fundraising cycles, community outreach, and program delivery. The key is documenting these informal habits so that when burnout or staff rotation happens, institutional knowledge isn’t lost.
- For-Profits: This phase translates into predictable workflow cadences, efficient project management pipelines, and reliable product delivery. Employees take ownership of their processes, reducing the need for constant micro-management from supervisors.
The cairns created during this stage do more than guide the current team. They become part of the organization’s institutional memory. They help preserve institutional knowledge and make organizational continuity possible when people leave, roles change, or new employees join the team.
4. The High Plateau: Performing and Building High-Performing Teams
Before long, the team is moving at peak pace. They are working smoothly, solving problems fast, and moving across the terrain like pros. High-performing teams often make the mistake of keeping their best ideas a secret, assuming everyone naturally knows why they are succeeding. Leaders need to build legacy markers that capture these advanced skills and mental models so the institutional wisdom isn’t lost if someone moves on to a different path.
The performing stage represents the point at which a team has developed the trust, skills, processes, and relationships necessary to work effectively with less direct intervention from its leaders. But reaching high performance is not the end of team leadership. It creates a new leadership responsibility: making sure the knowledge that produced that performance can be shared and carried forward.
- Public Agencies: High performance looks like seamless crisis response, flawless cross-departmental coordination, and efficient public service delivery. True leadership excellence here involves mentoring the next generation of civil servants, so expertise isn’t retired alongside veteran employees.
- Non-Profits: A high-performing non-profit operates like a finely tuned engine, scaling its impact and maximizing every dollar of donor trust. These teams must actively share their winning strategies so the broader community benefits from their success.
- For-Profits: Performing teams dominate their market niches through continuous innovation and autonomous execution. Supervisors must ensure that top-performing units don’t become insular silos, sharing their commercial playbooks with the rest of the enterprise.
This is where leadership continuity becomes particularly important. A team can be performing at a high level today and still be vulnerable tomorrow if its expertise exists only in the minds of a few experienced people. Leaders must capture what the team has learned, develop people who can carry that knowledge forward, and create systems that allow performance to survive personnel changes.
5. Breaking Camp: Adjourning and Preparing for What’s Next
Every hike eventually comes to an end. The project wraps up, the team finishes their work, and people get ready to go their separate ways. It can feel a bit sad or confusing. Leaders should never let a team vanish into the woods without closure. Building a final summit marker—a thorough debrief or after-action review—allows everyone to celebrate the finish, capture lessons learned, and carry good memories into the next adventure.
The adjourning stage is often overlooked in discussions of team development and effective team leadership. Yet the way a team ends can influence what the organization carries forward. A thoughtful conclusion turns experience into knowledge and knowledge into a resource for the next team.
- Public Agencies: Public projects and legislative task forces frequently sunset abruptly. Conducting formal after-action reviews ensures that taxpayer-funded lessons are archived and applied to the next public initiative rather than repeated as costly mistakes.
- Non-Profits: Grant-funded programs and community campaigns often reach natural conclusions. Closing camp with a proper celebration honors volunteer dedication and donor contributions, preserving goodwill for future campaigns.
- For-Profits: Product launches, client accounts, and corporate restructuring projects end regularly. A structured debrief prevents organizational amnesia, ensuring the team’s hard-won market insights feed directly into the next business cycle.
The cairns left behind by a team can become more important than the team itself. They tell those who follow where others have been, what they learned, and what to watch for along the way. That is how institutional knowledge becomes organizational continuity, and how leadership development contributes to lasting leadership continuity.
The journey is never really about reaching the top once. It is about making sure those who follow can find the trail.
For leaders, that means recognizing where each team is on its journey, understanding what it needs next, and deliberately building the markers that help people stay on course.
The best leaders don’t simply lead people up the mountain. They leave cairns behind so others can find the way.
Additional Reading
- Tuckman, Bruce W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399. (The foundational framework detailing the stages of group development).
- Katzenbach, Jon R., & Smith, Douglas K. (1993). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. Harvard Business Review Press. (An exploration of team dynamics, performance plateaus, and cross-functional realities).
- Senge, Peter M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday/Currency. (Essential reading on systems thinking, organizational memory, and managing non-linear enterprise growth).
Author’s Note: The content provided in this article is designed exclusively for educational and informational purposes, reflecting opinions shaped by decades of leadership training and organizational consulting experience. It should never be interpreted as formal professional advice. By reading or engaging with this material, you acknowledge that no professional-client relationship is established and that these insights do not substitute for tailored guidance from a qualified professional familiar with your specific circumstances. Consequently, readers are strongly advised to seek independent counsel from licensed legal, financial, medical, or other appropriate advisors before implementing any strategies or making decisions based on these perspectives. Ultimately, you assume full personal responsibility for any actions you choose to take or omit as a result of reading this material, releasing the author and publisher from any liability for outcomes arising from your reliance on the text.
