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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.