Team performance is a make-or-break factor for any company’s success. But let’s face it, consistently maintaining peak performance can be a real challenge.
Today, businesses must constantly evolve to stay ahead of dynamic market conditions, and employees can face pressure to keep up with that change.
As a manager, your role is crucial in keeping your team motivated and aligned with the organization’s goals. This means managing team expectations and sharing the tools that will help them stay focused, especially in the performing stage.
If you’re wondering what the performing stage is and how you can push your team toward it, this article is for you. Read on. 🧐
How to Optimize Team Performance During the Performing Stage
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is the Performing Stage?
The performing stage is one of the most important stages in Tuckman’s model of team development. The model was developed by Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist who used it to describe a theoretical process of how groups evolved and grew in the mid-1960s.
The performing stage is the fourth stage in the ‘Five Stages of Team Development’ model and is perhaps the most important phase. In this stage, every member of the team performs at their highest potential, and the team acts as a highly organized, cohesive unit.
The five stages of the model include:
- Stage 1: Forming stage
- Stage 2: Storming stage
- Stage 3: Norming stage
- Stage 4: Performing stage
- Stage 5: Adjourning stage
Let’s briefly understand all the team-building stages before we dive deep into the performing stage.
Stage #1: Forming stage
This stage is when your team or group members are just coming together.
Your team members may not know each other well. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the air, and the team may not be very productive. Members are still getting used to each other and need time to figure out their individual roles.
Stage #2: Storming stage
This is when team members are learning to work together. In this stage, sometimes conflicts may arise due to clashing personalities or opinions.
Team members may not have complete clarity on their roles yet and might overstep each other’s boundaries. Team dynamics can become challenging as members work to find the roles that best suit them.
Stage #3: Norming stage
This stage is when things finally start to fall into place. Your team members are fitting into their respective roles.
As they become comfortable working together on team tasks, they feel more at ease asking for help or seeking constructive feedback from one another.
Stage #4: Performing stage
Only successful teams can reach this prized stage, at which team members perform at their peak potential, not just individually but as a team.
If you have seen movies like Ratatouille or Burnt, here’s an example: At first, the chefs are constantly clashing with each other and interpersonal conflicts are aplenty. But by the end, they’re in perfect sync, like an in-tune, harmonious orchestra. That’s the performing stage.
At the performing stage,
- Your team has defined their roles, set clear boundaries where no one steps on another’s toes, and can collaborate effortlessly
- Members actively take up responsibility and assume the appropriate amount of authority to lead projects
- Every member helps each other identify and overcome mistakes, errors, and other shortcomings
- Members provide feedback to one another for better results and move in sync toward the team’s goals
- Everyone feels a deep sense of satisfaction with their progress
Your team also adheres to established workflows to achieve shared objectives, and members feel united in pursuing a common goal. This represents the ideal stage of group development.
As a team lead, your aim is to guide your team to this stage as swiftly as possible—and that’s exactly what we’re here to help you achieve.
Stage #5: Adjourning stage
This is the fifth and final of Tuckman’s stages when the team is ready to disband. It generally happens when the team’s mission is achieved.
This is the time when you and your team can celebrate what you’ve achieved. Reflect on your accomplishments and remind your team of the purpose behind their work.
Since this is the fifth stage, it is also an excellent opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the talents of individual team members.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhy Should You Aim For The Performing Stage?
The performing stage can yield the highest possible positive outcome for you and your team. 🎯
In this stage, there’s perfect sync and seamless communication, and most members are working flawlessly toward their goals.
The idea is to sustain the team at this stage for the longest possible time.
While it sounds great in theory, no team can stay consistently poised in the performing stage without any intervention. It’s on you, the team leader, to ensure your team stays in this stage for as long as possible, especially during projects.
To do that, you could start by dodging common challenges that can stem at this stage while maintaining strong leadership. Let’s learn more.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Are Some Common Challenges in the Performing Stage? And Why Do They Happen?
🚩Burnout
Burnout is the most formidable enemy when it comes to maintaining a high-performing team. And you can’t just solve it by introducing wellness activities. No matter how much your team members meditate or exercise, if they’re stuck in an environment that induces chronic stress, they will feel the heat.
Burnout is bad for business and for humans at large. 33% of employees admit that burnout makes them less focused at work, while 31% say it has caused them to lose interest in their jobs, and 21% report that it has led to more procrastination.
The top three causes for burnout include increased workload, mental health challenges that might stem from a lack of work-life boundaries, and unrealistic deadlines.
Other factors that contribute to workplace-led burnout include:
- Constant urgency
- Hierarchical and slow communication networks
- Micromanagement
- Lack of recognition for achievements
- Overreaching personal boundaries and work hours
🚩 Maintaining momentum
Another considerable challenge for managers is ensuring consistent team output, day after day and week after week. While you can’t expect 100% from your team all the time, it doesn’t mean that you should let stagnancy happen.
Some common causes of lost momentum include:
- Burnout (yes, they are all inter-related)
- Lack of aligned and clear goals
- Complacency
- Absence of key team players
- Lack of recognition
- External factors like changes in company values, upper management, and more
🚩 Rise of conflicts
Conflicts are inevitable. They might arise due to conflicts of interest, personality clashes, or other reasons.
Here are some common reasons for conflicts that arise in the performing stage and you might want to look out for:
- Differing professional opinions and work styles
- Working toward differing personal and professional goals
- Overlapping of roles in later stages of a project
- Personal belief systems
- Limited resources
- Organizational factors like changes in company policy or restructuring
- Stress caused by external factors like unrealistic deadlines from higher-ups/management
- Cut-throat competition
Any of these reasons (or others) could dampen what’s supposed to be a high-functioning, effective, and efficient team.
So, what do you need to get them back on their feet?
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Are Some Best Practices to Lead Effectively in the Performing Stage?
Strong leadership remains the top focus when handling and managing high-performing teams.
Despite your best efforts to assemble a team with the ideal blend of skills and attitudes, creating an environment where your team can thrive often requires adjusting its composition as its dynamics evolve.
Here are some strategies to handle teams at the performing stage:
✅ Conduct stage group activities
- Discuss the bigger picture: Actualize the position in which you wish to see yourself and your team after a certain time. Let your team visualize where they need to be with the project they’re currently working on. This helps them stay energized by envisioning their future achievements and manifest that level of team success
- Three main questions: Ask your team these three cornerstone questions:
- What has been working for us?
- What’s causing issues for us?
- What can we improve?
But, don’t save them for the end of the sprint.
Collect this valuable feedback at regular intervals during your project cycle to get a good idea of the above topics. Providing timely feedback, addressing issues early, and highlighting progress creates a sense of continuous improvement and achievement for all team members
- All-inclusive brainstorming sessions: Visualize your ideas with the help of this rapid-fire exercise. It gets your group together and encourages them to think in innovative ways to help with the timely completion of the project you’re working on
Imagine having an endless space to populate with textual and visual ideas to track projects and activities. That’s what ClickUp Whiteboards help you do.
With ClickUp Whiteboards, you can:
- Collaborate visually on a single, shared platform to turn ideas into actionable insights
- Brainstorm, strategize, create mind maps, and plan agile workflows
- Connect with ClickUp tools like Tasks for a seamless transition from ideation to action
- Link work files, Docs, and tasks directly on your Whiteboard
✅ Acknowledge contributions
A team is an amalgamation of contrasting personalities.
Of course, some members will be more dynamic than others and, as a result, be more visible. It’s your job, as a leader, to clearly understand who’s contributing in what way during a project.
Make sure that the less visible members get a chance to be in the spotlight by recognizing their contributions. This will lead to a team that is aware of the talents of all its members and celebrates them, irrespective of how vocal an individual is.
To get this done efficiently, you can use a team management system that helps you track the tasks done. You can use multiple ClickUp features in unison here. The first one is ClickUp Tasks.
With Tasks, you can:
- Assign actionable, clear, and well-defined tasks to your team
- Track task progress to understand your team’s performance
- Plan, organize, and collaborate seamlessly on any project
- Categorize tasks by priority and assignment
- Link related tasks and track progress with Custom Statuses
Another nifty way to track your progress is to use the ClickUp Project Tracker Template.
With it, you can group tasks by stage, track progress, and collaborate seamlessly with your team. It’s perfect for managing multiple projects without getting overwhelmed. You’ll stay organized, get real-time updates, and know everyone’s contributions.
✅ Always set achievable goals
A team performing at its peak needs to be focused and aligned toward a common goal. This begins by giving every team member well-defined and actionable goals aligned to their roles.
Avoid overlapping goals to prevent conflicts between tasks. Keep raising the bar slightly each time to ensure your team keeps striving for excellence without stagnating.
Once you’ve set your goals, communicate them to your employees and monitor their completion closely. To get all of that done in a single place without having to switch tabs, use ClickUp Goals.
ClickUp Goals let you:
- Automatically track progress toward Goals by linking tasks, using numerical, monetary, or true/false targets
- Organize Goals in one place using folders, making it easy to monitor related objectives together
- Set various target types (e.g., sprint cycles, weekly scorecards) to suit different needs
- Share Goals, manage permissions, and keep everyone aligned with clear timelines and deadlines
✅ Lay out clear priorities
Your team can’t work optimally if you classify every task as urgent! When everything is urgent, nothing is truly urgent. This can cause your team to be swamped with multiple conflicting priorities and unrealistic deadlines, which can cause stress.
That’s why you must create well-defined criteria for urgency and prioritize each task accordingly. Plan well and create a system in which you not only assign tasks to your teammates but can also label them based on their importance.
For instance, you can color code top-priority items as red, followed by yellow and green, for a simple yet universally recognizable system.
You can also use one of the many prioritization systems like:
- The Eisenhower Matrix
- MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have) method
- ABC method of priority (‘A’ includes High Priority & High Urgency, ‘B’ includes Medium Priority & Medium Urgency, ‘C’ includes Low Priority & Low Urgency)
- RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort) scores
✅ Ensure proper work-life balance
Understand that your employees have a life outside of their jobs.
If you constantly blur the boundaries between the personal and the professional, your employees won’t be able to rest or vacation well. They won’t be able to fully disconnect from work, leading to exhaustion and frustration.
This is especially important as a huge part of the workforce has started to opt for remote or hybrid work environments.
53% of jobs in the US are currently hybrid. That means you need to prepare yourself to handle and manage the challenges that come with this flexible, often asynchronous work environment.
✅ Encourage transparent and efficient communication
Communication is key to motivating and recognizing your employees’ efforts. Your role should be that of an enabler, not a hindrance to the workflow.
You need to stay accessible to your teammates so they don’t have to jump through multiple hoops to get into a meeting with you.
Ensure all your team members feel comfortable approaching you. Consider implementing an open-door policy to encourage people to voice their opinions. Also, get rid of inefficient communication silos by introducing communication pipelines that are streamlined.
Try to avoid delays or miscommunications when sharing messages between teammates, including yourself.
ClickUp once again provides a powerful solution to that in the form of the ClickUp Chat View. It facilitates seamless coordination between departments, teams, and members with interconnected tasks and roles.
Use ClickUp’s Chat View to communicate directly with team members and departments within your workspace while easily sharing relevant files, tasks, and documents.
✅ Foster trust and autonomy; monitor but don’t micromanage
If you don’t have trust in your team, you need to ask yourself some probing questions. Working with a team you can’t count on can mess up your whole workflow. It also may be an indicator of an unhealthy work environment.
That said, don’t fall into the trap of micromanaging. If you start managing each member down to the smallest detail, it simply shows that you don’t trust them enough to leave the job in their hands.
Encourage your team to take on leadership roles during projects to show that they’re ready for autonomy. You need to strike a balance between allowing teammates to flourish independently while keeping a close eye on their progress and being ready to jump in whenever your presence or decision-making is required.
ClickUp Project Management Roles and Responsibilities Template
To assign tasks while maintaining a bird’s eye view of the entire scenario, try ClickUp’s Project Management Roles and Responsibilities Template. It helps you define roles, assign tasks, and ensure everyone knows who’s accountable for what.
Using this template can make sure everything runs smoothly, no matter the size of your organization. The template provides a clear plan, ensures everyone knows their roles, improves coordination between teams, and helps catch issues early on before they become bigger problems.
✅ Conduct regular feedback cycles
In the performing stage, your teammates will readily offer critical, constructive feedback to each other.
It’s important to keep these communication lines open and healthy. In fact, as a manager and leader, you can promptly ask for constructive feedback and set an example for the other team members. One of the best ways to go about this is by organizing anonymous surveys that showcase exactly what you’re good at and the areas that need improvement.
By creating a feedback loop in your team, you develop an environment of constant learning and improvement.
You can easily collect meaningful feedback with ClickUp’s Employee Feedback and Check-In Survey Template. Use it to quickly gather insights, identify areas for improvement, and address any concerns, all while streamlining the feedback process.
Summarize this article for me pleaseKeep Your Performing Stage Powered Up With ClickUp
The performing stage is where your team shines, works together with minimal conflicts, and maximizes productivity.
To sustain this optimal phase, you need to manage potential challenges. An overarching project management tool can help you navigate all five stages of Tuckman’s model.
ClickUp can be that tool for you. It offers a comprehensive solution to keep your team aligned and productive. It also helps you set goals, prioritize tasks, define roles, streamline communication, gather feedback, and monitor performance.
By integrating ClickUp into your workflow, you can prevent issues before they arise and maintain your team’s long-term success.
Don’t let disorder disrupt your progress. Sign up to ClickUp for free today and keep your team performing at their best.
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