Five Stages of Team Development and Group Presentation

Five Stages of Team Development and Our Team Presentation

The piranhas were out to get us. That is how our team felt after our presentation. However, we felt that we learned a valuable lesson. In real life, if we were to deliver bad news and our audience reacted the same way our class did to our presentation, we would be prepared in the future. The preparation process for this presentation was long and tedious but was well worth it. Our team did go through Boston University School of Management's five stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.

Stage 1: Forming

The first step that we did was to develop a team charter. We had a conference call on September 28th to get to know each other better and discuss our strengths and weaknesses. We then proceeded to discuss and develop the team contact. We discussed our mission, goals, expectations, policies, procedures, and roles. Our goals were to deliver our message effectively, to learn about each other, work together, and to have fun in the process. We expected everyone to actively participate and follow our policies and procedures. Using our DiSC profiles, we assigned roles to each other. Finally, we developed a project plan.

Stage 2: Storming

Roles were determined by our DiSC profiles. Jee, who is D/C, was the leader and his house served as the meeting point for two of our meetings. He also made sure that all bases were covered. Shyla, who is I/D, was motivating us, kept us in check, and made sure that we weren't going off on a tangent too often. Tom, who is S/C, set up the meeting places, sent reminder memos, and encouraged everyone to share their ideas. Saw and I, who are both I's, motivated and got everyone to agree to our plans. Our roles pretty much stayed the same throughout the preparation process. We were meeting at least twice weekly, so we were not under a lot of time constraints. Because of adequate preparation, we did not feel too much pressure and no one cracked.

That Saturday we had a conference call in the morning to make sure that everyone was on track and that we had sent our outlines to each other. The following day we met to discuss our roles and discussed the general outline of our presentation. There were different ideas as to how to do our presentation. We worked together to finally agree upon one format for our presentation. We first decided that our classmates would be the employees of J.C. Enterprises. We chose Jee, who seemed to fit the role of the father, to be the retiring owner of J.C. Enterprises. Then we chose Tom, who is one of the sons that will be leaving, to give rationale for the merger. Then we chose Saw, who is the son that will be moving to A+ entertainment, to present the logistics of the move. I was the HR director, since I was more familiar with the hiring process due to my position in my current job. We chose Shyla as the new company's CEO, since she is very driven and a go-getter. Tom, Saw, and I have had experiences with mergers, and we brought that to the table. In deciding our roles, we were in consensus. We also made sure that everyone was participating.

Stage 3: Norming

That Friday we met on campus and finalized our outline. Everyone knew what their roles and responsibilities were. We started practicing our speech aloud. We also drew out a timeline of the events that was to happen and finished our PowerPoint presentation. We ran through a dry run to see how long our presentation was and based on the presentation, we also drew up a list of questions that the audience might ask us. Then Troy emailed us the list of questions and everyone provided their answers. There were no slackers to confront. Everyone participated and completed their work on time. Everyone was positive and was motivated to do well. I personally did not observe