A group that wishes to become a high-performing team begins by becoming aware of the stages it must go through to get there: forming, storming, norming, and performing. You might ask, how can a group "skip" the first couple of stages and get right to the performing stage? The answer is: you can’t. To understand these stages is to first realize that they can’t be altered. Group development happens in these four stages. How well it happens can be influenced, however.

When a group is first forming, group members tend to be on their best behavior, and are very nice and polite to each other. Because group members are experiencing such "nice" behaviors from each other, they begin to believe that they just skipped to the performing stage. Unfortunately, this stage can be deceiving, because inevitably, at least one member will be ready to move on to the next stage: storming!

The storming stage can look many different ways. Group members might disagree, withdraw, leave, talk behind other's backs, or holler at each other. At this stage, members are becoming more independent, and often try to get others to see things their way-a potential source of conflict. Another common problem is confusion about the task or goal the group is trying to accomplish. Team members don't understand how everything could be going so good, and then just fall apart. But when a group gets to this stage, it just moved one step closer to becoming a high-performing team! The challenge is getting through the storming stage as effectively as possible.

After the storming stage, a group moves into the norming stage. Here, group norms are generally created as a result of the conflict that occurred in the storming stage. After a particularly intense storming stage, group members are often very anxious and willing to make agreements as to how to work together to avoid falling back into the storming stage. It can take time to do this, but it is essential to ensuring buy-in into the newly created group norms. Only now is a team on its way to the next stage: performing.

Once in the performing stage, life is good! The challenge is staying here. It is hard work to sustain a team at this stage. In fact, the team WILL move in and out of this stage. Anytime there is a change in the membership or the task or goal, the team automatically falls back to the forming stage. But a team that has experienced the performing stage can quickly move through the previous stages back to performing again. The team must constantly revisit its norms as the world changes around them, and make appropriate tweaks to those norms to get back to being a high performing team.

A high-performing team uses effective conflict management skills to get them through the initial and subsequent storming stages. The team familiarizes itself with the various conflict management approaches, and chooses the approach that best fits its situation. When choosing a conflict management strategy, one element to consider is time. Avoiding conflict takes virtually no time. Collaboration is a more time-consuming style. But if the consequences of not resolving a conflict are high, the time investment is worth it. Groups that wish to become high-performing teams must be willing to invest this time when they first experience the storming stage. Doing so will enable the team to move much more quickly through conflicts. They will become high-performing teams with an ability to "fight nice!"