Managing people

Your team isn't lazy or difficult. It's probably just storming.

By Nichola Morgan MCIPD · Reviewed 6 September 2026

A new starter joins a team of six. Within a month, two of the old hands are barely speaking, deadlines are slipping that never used to, and the manager is convinced morale has collapsed. Nothing has gone wrong. This is what teams normally look like partway through changing.

Most owners I work with think a struggling team is a sign something's broken. Often it's a sign something's working exactly as it should — just at an uncomfortable stage.

The stage most small teams get stuck in

Psychologist Bruce Tuckman described how teams typically develop: forming, storming, norming, performing. Every team that's ever done good work has been through some version of this, usually more than once — a new hire, a departure, a change of direction, and the team can slide back a stage even after reaching a good one.

Forming is the polite stage. Everyone's finding their feet, nobody wants to rock the boat, and it feels calm because people are avoiding conflict rather than resolving it.

Storming is where it gets uncomfortable. Roles aren't fully clear yet, people start disagreeing about how things should be done, and it can genuinely feel like the team is going backwards. It isn't. It's the point where real differences finally surface instead of staying buried under politeness.

Norming is where trust starts to build, ways of working settle, and people can disagree with each other without it feeling personal.

Performing is the stage everyone wants — the team runs well, people cover for each other's gaps, and it doesn't all funnel through you.

Where feedback actually does the work

Storming is the stage most small teams get stuck in, and the single biggest reason is that nobody's giving each other honest feedback yet. Without it, disagreements stay as tension rather than becoming a resolved difference of opinion. The team can't move to norming because nothing's actually being named out loud.

This is where good feedback isn't a soft skill or a nice-to-have — it's the mechanism that moves a team from stuck to working. A team that can tell each other “that didn't land well” or “I think we should do this differently” and have it land as useful rather than personal has already done most of the work of getting to norming.

What gets in the way, in a small business specifically

In a bigger company, there's often a layer of process that forces feedback to happen anyway — probation reviews, structured 1:1s, an HR function nudging things along. In a business of ten or twenty people, none of that exists by default. Feedback happens if the owner or manager makes it happen, and often it doesn't, because everyone's busy and it feels like an extra task rather than the actual job.

The other thing I see a lot: feedback saved up. Something small goes unsaid for weeks because it doesn't feel worth a “proper conversation,” until it's not small anymore and the conversation that finally happens is much harder than the one that would have taken two minutes back when it started.

What actually helps

Feedback that moves a team forward tends to have a few things in common. It's specific — about a particular thing that happened, not a general impression. It happens close to the event, not saved up. It's about behaviour, not character. And it goes both ways — a team stuck in storming often has plenty of criticism flowing but almost no recognition of what's actually working, which makes the whole thing feel like an attack rather than a team getting better together.

None of this needs a framework or a form. It needs a habit — saying the thing, reasonably promptly, in a way the other person can actually do something with.

The takeaway: use the AID model

Action — what actually happened, specifically. Not “you were unprofessional,” but “you spoke over Sarah twice in the client call.”

Impact — what effect it had. “It meant her idea didn't get heard, and the client only heard your version.”

Development — what to do instead, or more of. “Next time, let her finish, then build on what she's said.”

That's it. Three sentences, no framework needed beyond remembering the order. Praise works the same way — “you handled that client escalation calmly” (Action), “it kept the account, and the team saw how it's done” (Impact), “keep doing that when things get heated” (Development). Specific praise like that lands far harder than “good job.”

This is the storming-stage argument made practical: a team that uses AID, even loosely, has a shared way to say the hard thing without it becoming personal. That's most of what moves a team from storming to norming.

What this doesn't tell you

Not every stuck team is stuck because of feedback. Sometimes it's role clarity, sometimes it's capacity, sometimes it's simply the wrong person in the wrong seat. What Tuckman's model is good for is telling you that friction isn't automatically a crisis — it's very often just where teams sit while they're becoming good ones, and the way through tends to be more honest conversation, not less.

General information, not legal advice. Correct as at September 2026; timetables can change.