Forming to Performing: Fostering Trust and Results
Leaders often face a central challenge: how to guide teams toward high performance without edging into micromanagement or undermining trust. Striking a balance between offering enough oversight to encourage accountability and providing sufficient autonomy to preserve morale is crucial. This delicate balance becomes clearer through the lens of the Hawthorne effect, a concept originating from industrial experiments at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in the early 20th century. The social experiments showed that people may modify their behavior simply because they know they're being observed: an awareness that can boost productivity but can also lead to anxiety or artificial behavior if it feels intrusive. By understanding this phenomenon, leaders can evaluate themselves to determine whether their methods of supervision genuinely empower teams or inadvertently place them under a microscope. The more a leader understands the Hawthorne effect, the better equipped they will be to support an effective team.
While enabling team effectiveness is a primary goal for all leaders, teams rarely evolve into cohesive powerhouses overnight. Their journey often unfolds in four stages: forming, storming, norming, and performing (Tuckman, 1965). In the forming phase, members get acquainted and define objectives that reflect the organization's values, providing a shared sense of direction from the start. Storming naturally follows, marked by clashes in ideas, working styles, and expectations; while uncomfortable, this friction can be healthy if guided by those same core values, helping the team clarify roles and refine a collective approach. Norming emerges once members recognize common ground and establish consistent methods and routines. When a team reaches the performing stage, it operates in sync toward shared goals, balancing efficiency with trust. At each phase, organizational values provide a steady anchor, keeping collaboration aligned with ethical principles and collective purpose, even when conflict or uncertainty arises.
Through each of these four developmental phases, psychological safety remains vital. Team members who feel safe sharing unfiltered ideas and honest feedback naturally bring more innovation. Observing and offering feedback can push a team to excel, but the purpose behind gathering data or tracking metrics should always be transparent. When people understand that oversight is meant to help them rather than reprimand them, trust can flourish. In turn, teams are more likely to take healthy risks and voice creative solutions.
These concepts underscore that effective leadership is about more than driving transactional results; it's about creating an environment where performance and trust reinforce one another. By blending observational insights with clarity, respect for autonomy, and a set of core organizational values that guide each stage of team development, leaders can transform a loosely connected group into a cohesive, high-performing force that succeeds by staying true to shared principles every step of the way.
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Written by Robert Rich, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, VP of Transformational Consulting at The Encompass Group
References
Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399.