Team development isn’t linear. Even high-performing teams can find themselves tumbling back into conflict and frustration seemingly overnight. As Jo Taylor, MD at Let’s Talk Talent, says:
“Sometimes, it all goes to hell in a handbasket really fast.”
If you’re leading a team through disagreement, pushback, or declining morale, you’re not failing – you’re facing one of the most predictable stages in Tuckman’s team development model. The storming phase is normal, necessary, and entirely manageable with the right approach. The question isn’t whether you’ll encounter it, but how quickly you’ll move your team through it.
This guide provides actionable strategies to diagnose what’s happening, resolve conflict effectively, and accelerate your team’s progress toward productive collaboration.
In this article
- What Is the Storming Phase?
- How to Help Your Team Move Out of Storming
- Address Group Conflict Immediately
- Rebuild Team Trust
- How to Tell If You Need an Action Plan
- Coming Out of the Storming Phase
- Move Your Team Forward with Confidence
What Is the Storming Phase?
Storming is the second stage of Tuckman’s team development cycle, following the initial forming phase where teams first come together. During storming, reality sets in: individual working styles clash, leadership approaches face resistance, and the honeymoon period ends.
This stage isn’t always dramatic. Not every disagreement signals a return to storming – teams naturally have conflicts throughout their lifecycle. However, certain patterns indicate you’ve entered this challenging phase:
- Frequent arguments requiring mediation: Team leaders repeatedly step in to resolve disputes between members
- Resistance to established processes: People push back against agreed ways of working or ignore wider team goals
- Formation of cliques or subgroups: Team members align with certain colleagues whilst excluding others, creating silos
- Unproductive busyness: Everyone appears overwhelmed with work, yet progress stalls and deliverables slip
- Declining engagement and rising churn: Motivation drops, and your best performers may start looking elsewhere
Storming is natural and even necessary for growth. Teams must work through these tensions to establish genuine collaboration. The danger lies not in entering this phase, but in staying there too long without intervention.
How to Help Your Team Move Out of Storming
Moving through storming requires deliberate action from leadership. Ignoring conflict rarely resolves it – teams need structured support to rebuild trust and momentum.
Address Group Conflict Immediately
Before rushing in with solutions, spend time understanding what’s actually happening. Areas of friction often reveal inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement. As Jo notes:
“You learn the most when things aren’t going right.”
Gather comprehensive feedback through individual conversations, stakeholder input, and 360-degree reviews. Look for patterns rather than isolated incidents. Is the conflict about workload distribution? Unclear roles? Leadership style? Personality clashes? Each root cause requires a different intervention.
Once you’ve diagnosed the issues, act decisively. This may mean making difficult decisions, but clarity and directness matter more than delaying for consensus. Ambiguity only prolongs the storming phase.
Don’t hesitate to access support systems when needed. Your HR department, external coaches, or team performance solutions can provide objective guidance during complex situations.
Quick action plan:
- Diagnose root causes: Use feedback mechanisms to understand what’s driving conflict.
- Act decisively and communicate clearly: Be direct and honest about your plan, leaving no room for ambiguity.
- Involve support systems: Access HR, coaching, or external facilitation as needed
Rebuild Team Trust
After addressing immediate conflict, focus on rebuilding the foundation of psychological safety and trust that allows teams to perform.
1. Role Model the Behaviors You Want to See
Leaders set the tone for team culture. Demonstrate vulnerability by asking questions, admitting mistakes, and actively seeking feedback on your leadership. Show that it’s safe to be honest by being honest yourself first.
Communicate freely with your team and create platforms for healthy debate. When team members see you handling disagreement constructively, they’ll follow suit.
2. Make Trust a Priority
Trust requires active cultivation, not passive hope. Listen to your team members with genuine empathy – approach them as humans first, managers second. Ask what they love and loathe about being part of the team, then follow up with concrete action on their concerns.
Acknowledging feedback matters, but acting on it demonstrates real commitment to change.
3. Encourage Deeper Connections
Teams that understand each other work through conflict more effectively. Use profiling tools like DISC or Myers-Briggs to help members understand different working styles and communication preferences. Share results openly so everyone knows what makes their colleagues tick.
Consider team development workshops or away days as reset opportunities. We’ve worked with clients who successfully moved past storming by stepping away from daily pressures to rebuild relationships and realign on shared goals. Make these sessions engaging – one team used the UCAS career buzz quiz to discover their ‘totem animals’ and spark conversations about working preferences. When teams connect on a human level, they navigate professional tensions more gracefully.
If your team continues struggling, coaching and assessment support from an external facilitator can provide the impartial perspective needed to break through entrenched patterns.
How to Tell If You Need an Action Plan
Some triggers commonly push teams back into storming: new leadership, reorganised roles, consistently missed goals, or sustained negativity that affects morale. If you’re unsure whether intervention is warranted, consider this diagnostic checklist:
- Is the same conflict recurring despite attempts to resolve it?
- Have distinct subgroups formed within the team, creating us-versus-them dynamics?
- Has productivity measurably dropped over several weeks?
- Are engagement scores declining or churn rates rising?
If you answered yes to multiple questions, fast intervention is essential. Prolonged storming lowers engagement, damages productivity, and increases attrition – particularly among your highest performers who have more opportunities elsewhere.
Coming Out of the Storming Phase
Teams are dynamic ecosystems, constantly evolving rather than remaining static. Finding yourself in the storming phase doesn’t reflect poorly on your leadership skills – it’s an inevitable part of team development.
What distinguishes effective leaders is their ability to recognise the symptoms quickly and take decisive action. You demonstrate worth not by avoiding storming entirely, but by equipping yourself with the tools to guide your team through it efficiently.
For hybrid and virtual teams, navigating storming may require additional creativity since proximity no longer facilitates casual relationship-building. Consider digital workshops, online profiling exercises, and structured virtual connection opportunities to maintain trust and alignment.
A comprehensive people development strategy embeds these interventions throughout your team’s lifecycle, while change and transformation consultancy can support teams through particularly complex transitions.
Remember: teams that successfully work through storming emerge stronger, with clearer communication patterns and deeper trust. The discomfort is temporary; the benefits of reaching the norming and performing stages are lasting.
Move Your Team Forward with Confidence
Storming is uncomfortable but navigable. With clear diagnosis, decisive action, and commitment to rebuilding trust, you can accelerate your team’s progress toward genuine collaboration and high performance.
Want to move your team out of conflict and into collaboration? Book a team development workshop, explore our team performance solutions, or contact us for bespoke coaching to improve results.
FAQs
Why does the storming phase happen?
Storming typically occurs following shifts in team membership, leadership changes, or evolving priorities. It can also emerge from underlying trust issues, poorly defined roles, or conflicting goals that weren’t adequately addressed during the forming stage.
How long does storming normally last?
With active management, storming typically lasts from a few weeks to a few months. Teams left to navigate it independently may remain stuck for significantly longer. The duration depends largely on how quickly leaders diagnose issues and implement targeted interventions.
What’s the biggest mistake managers make in storming?
Ignoring conflict and hoping it resolves itself. This passive approach allows tensions to become entrenched, making them harder to address later. Teams need active leadership during storming – silence is rarely interpreted as patience but rather as indifference or inability to handle difficult situations.
When should we bring in external team coaching?
Consider external support when your internal reset attempts fail to gain traction, when conflict has become deeply entrenched, or when you need an impartial facilitator to break through established patterns. Let’s Talk Talent’s team is here to provide objective guidance and proven interventions tailored to your specific challenges.
