If Forming is the stage where a team is on its best behaviour, Storming is the stage where it stops pretending. The early politeness gives way to something messier: people start disagreeing about priorities, pushing back on decisions, testing where the real authority sits, and discovering that a shared sense of purpose doesn’t automatically mean shared opinion. Bruce Tuckman named this second stage of group development Storming for good reason, and it is every bit as uncomfortable as it sounds.

Most leaders treat that discomfort as a fault to correct — something to shut down quickly so the team can get back to being productive. That instinct is understandable, and almost always wrong. Storming is not an obstacle on the way to a well-functioning team; it is part of the route. Teams rushed through it, or carefully managed around it, rarely build the resilience they will need later, when the real pressure arrives. Teams allowed to storm properly, with the right structure and support, tend to come out of it considerably stronger than they went in.

What’s actually happening in Storming

Once the early caution of Forming wears off, people start acting like themselves. Opinions that were held back start surfacing. Working styles that looked compatible in theory turn out to clash in practice. Someone questions a decision that seemed settled. Someone else pushes for more autonomy, or less. The roles and norms that felt agreed in Forming get tested against the reality of actually doing the work together — and in several places, they don’t hold.

This is also where the team’s relationship with authority starts to shift. Early on, people look to the leader for direction almost automatically. In Storming, that deference begins to erode — not out of disrespect, but because the team is working out, often for the first time, how much it trusts the leader’s judgement and how much room it has to push back. Handled well, that’s a healthy sign of a team starting to think for itself. Handled badly, it curdles into factionalism, point-scoring, or a quiet disengagement that looks calmer than it is.

Where it goes wrong

Storming doesn’t fail because teams disagree. It fails because of how leaders respond when they do. Five pitfalls show up again and again:

1. Treating conflict as a discipline problem. When disagreement surfaces, the instinct is often to shut it down — move the meeting along, remind people to “stay professional,” redirect to the agenda. That reads as leadership, but it just pushes the disagreement out of the room, where it carries on unmanaged and usually gets worse.
2. Avoiding the conversation that actually matters. Teams in Storming frequently have one real issue driving most of the friction — a resourcing decision, an unclear mandate, a working relationship that isn’t working. It’s far easier to address the symptoms, missed deadlines and terse emails, than the cause, so that’s what most leaders do.
3. Letting the most assertive voices win by default. Storming rewards confidence, not necessarily correctness. Without active facilitation, the person most comfortable with conflict tends to dominate it, and quieter, often equally valid, views get crowded out before they’re properly heard.
4. Taking sides to end the discomfort faster. A leader who wants Storming over quickly can be tempted to simply back one position and settle the argument. It works in the short term and costs trust in the medium term, because the team learns that disagreement gets resolved by authority rather than by argument.
5. Reading necessary conflict as a sign the team has failed. Some leaders interpret Storming itself as evidence something has gone wrong — a hiring mistake, a culture problem, a team that “doesn’t gel.” That reading usually leads to disbanding or restructuring teams that were, in fact, doing exactly what a developing team is supposed to do.

Why fear of conflict costs you more than the conflict itself

Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team places Fear of Conflict directly above Absence of Trust, and the sequencing matters. A team that built real trust during Forming has the foundation to disagree productively in Storming — they can challenge an idea without it reading as a challenge to the person, because they’ve already established that the relationship can take it. A team without that foundation experiences every disagreement as a small risk to the relationship, and manages that risk by avoiding the disagreement altogether.

That avoidance looks like harmony from the outside. It isn’t. Lencioni’s point — and ours — is that artificial harmony is a cost, not a saving. It simply defers the disagreement to a worse moment, usually one with higher stakes and less goodwill in reserve. A team that cannot have a difficult conversation in Storming will not magically find the ability to have one later, under real pressure, when it matters considerably more.

What good Storming actually looks like

A team storming well still looks uncomfortable from the outside — that’s not a sign it’s being done wrong. The difference is in the structure around the discomfort. Disagreement gets raised directly, in the room, rather than relitigated afterwards in private conversations. The leader facilitates rather than referees, making space for the quieter views and naming the real issue when the conversation is skating around it. Roles and working norms get revisited explicitly, rather than left to settle by whoever pushes hardest.

We find this stage is also where taking a team out of its usual environment earns its keep most clearly. Away from the office, working through an unfamiliar physical challenge together, the usual status games lose most of their power — nobody’s job title helps them navigate a river crossing or get a team safely down a hillside in poor weather. What’s left is closer to how people actually work: how they handle pressure, how they communicate under strain, how they recover from a disagreement and keep going. A real storm, weathered together outdoors, tends to make the metaphorical one considerably easier to get through afterwards.

If you missed it, the first piece in this series looked at why Forming deserves more attention than it usually gets. Our Leading People, Managing Teams work is built for leaders navigating exactly this stage, and you can read more about Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team if you want the fuller model behind the thinking here.