The Stage Your Virtual Team Keeps Trying to Skip

Every team wants to be at peak performance by next week. Virtual teams want it even faster, because the apparatus of remote work — the shared docs, the tidy org chart, the calendar full of standups — creates an illusion that the team is already assembled and humming. It rarely is. Teams develop in stages, and the stages don’t care how good your tooling is.

Tuckman’s model remains the most useful map of that development. Teams move through five phases — forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning — each with its own demands and its own failure modes (Tuckman, 1965; Tuckman & Jensen, 1977). The model was built for teams in general, but it has a particular sharpness for virtual ones, because distance removes the natural forces that usually push a team through the harder early phases. What happens automatically in a shared office has to be done deliberately online.

Forming: the uncertainty you have to break on purpose

 In the forming stage, people are polite, reserved, and quietly unsure of their roles and the task ahead. In a physical workplace, that ambiguity dissolves through proximity — overheard conversations, lunch, the slow accretion of context. Online, it has nowhere to go. It sits there and hardens into hesitation.
 

The fix is unglamorous and effective: start with connection before content. Initiating a new project with a preliminary call simply to introduce people and build rapport helps forge the personal bonds that matter most precisely where face-to-face interaction is absent (Aquino et al., 2022). Then make the implicit explicit — define roles and expectations from the outset, so people aren’t guessing about who owns what. A focused, secure starting environment is something a virtual leader builds, not something the team stumbles into.

Storming: the conflict worth having

 Storming is the friction stage, where differing viewpoints, working styles, and assumptions about competence collide. Distributed teams are tempted to route around it entirely — conflict feels riskier over video, easier to mute than to work through. That avoidance is a mistake.
 

Handled well, storming is where a team learns to use itself. Building an effective team begins with recognizing and valuing each member’s distinct strengths, and assembling the work to leverage those strengths tends to produce the best performance (Aquino et al., 2022). Conflict, managed rather than suppressed, is how a team confronts and resolves real differences — and comes out with a stronger shared understanding than it had before. A team that never storms hasn’t achieved harmony; it has usually just postponed the argument to a worse moment.

Norming: where trust quietly takes hold

 In norming, the friction resolves, interpersonal bonds strengthen, and clearer norms and roles emerge. People adjust to one another and start working as a unit. This is the stage where trust is actually built — and in virtual teams, where relationships are harder to form, the way you lead through it matters enormously. Adopting shared leadership rather than concentrating it has been found to enhance trust and improve satisfaction at the team level (Aquino et al., 2022). Distributing ownership signals that the team is a collaboration, not a hub-and-spoke arrangement with a leader at the center and isolated workers at the edges.

Performing, then adjourning well

 Performing is the payoff: high efficiency, real synergy, trust and cooperation at their peak, the team finally focused outward on the goal rather than inward on itself. It’s also the stage you only reach by paying the earlier ones their due. There is no shortcut from forming to performing; the teams that try to take one end up cycling back through storming at the worst possible time.

And then there’s the stage almost everyone forgets. Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) addition of an adjourning stage addresses what happens when the work is done and the team disbands. Proper closure here is not sentimental housekeeping — it ensures members leave with a sense of accomplishment and genuine recognition for what they contributed. In virtual settings, where a project can simply evaporate from a calendar, deliberate closure is what turns a finished task into a relationship worth rejoining next time.

Move through the stages, don’t manage around them

Navigating these phases well is what separates functional virtual teams from frustrated ones. Diagnostic approaches during the forming stage — comprehensive data gathering through surveys, interviews, and observation — help leaders clarify roles and design targeted interventions for the specific dynamics in front of them (Stone et al., 2018). And because the interplay between leadership style and work environment is real, interventions need to be tailored to each team’s context rather than applied from a template (Khan, 2020).

If your virtual team feels stuck, the diagnosis is often simple: it’s stranded in a stage it tried to skip. The way forward isn’t a new tool. It’s going back and doing the developmental work distance let you avoid.

— Nikki

Clarity over noise. Integrity over impulse. Long-term alignment over short-term momentum.

References

 Aquino, J. F., Riss, R. R., Multerer, S. M., Mogilner, L. N., & Turner, T. L. (2022). A step-by-step guide for mentors to facilitate team building and communication in virtual teams. Medical Education Online, 27(1), 1–6. https://doi-org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/10872981.2022.2094529

Khan, M. A. (2020). The interplay of leadership styles, innovative work behavior, organizational culture, and organizational citizenship behavior. SAGE Open, 10(1), 215824401989826. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019898264

Stone, K. B., Brown, L., Smith, S. L., & Jacobs, J. (2018). Organizational assessment: An integrated approach to diagnosis and interventions. Organization Development Journal, 36(1), 67–95.

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399.

Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. (1977). Stages of small-group development revisited. Group & Organizational Studies, 2(4), 419–427.