Tuckman’s model gets taught as four stages — Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing — and most leaders skip straight to the interesting bit. Storming gets the airtime: the friction, the disagreements, the moment a team’s dynamics finally show themselves. Forming, by comparison, looks uneventful. People are polite. Meetings run smoothly. Nobody’s arguing. It’s tempting to read that as health.

It isn’t. Forming is doing more work than it looks like, and most of the problems that surface later in Storming were seeded here — quietly, politely, and almost always unnoticed.

What’s actually happening in Forming

In the Forming stage, a team isn’t yet a team — it’s a group of individuals working out where they stand. Nobody has tested the ground yet, not with each other, and not with you as the leader. The apparent calm is caution, not cohesion. People are watching for cues: what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, who speaks and who doesn’t, how disagreement is handled on the rare occasion it surfaces. They’re building an unspoken model of how this team operates, and once that model sets, it’s genuinely hard to shift.

This is also the stage with the highest dependency on the leader. Teams in Forming look to you for structure, for clarity on purpose and roles, for a sense that someone has actually thought about where this is going. That’s not a weakness to delegate away quickly. It’s what the stage needs.

Where it goes wrong

Most of the damage done in Forming comes from leaders reading quiet as calm, and moving on too fast. Five pitfalls show up again and again:

1. Mistaking politeness for alignment. Agreement in a Forming-stage meeting rarely means genuine agreement — it usually means nobody feels safe enough yet to disagree out loud. Read quiet compliance as buy-in, and you’ll build decisions on a foundation nobody actually tested.
2. Pulling back too soon. Leaders instinctively want to let a new team find its feet, handing over ownership early as a show of trust. In Forming, that tends to read as absence rather than empowerment — and a team without enough structure here usually defaults to whoever is most confident in the room, not whoever is most useful.
3. Treating it as a single event. A well-run kick-off meeting is not the same as a completed Forming stage. The understanding this stage needs to build — purpose, roles, how the team will actually work together — takes repeated, deliberate attention, not one good session.
4. Skipping the human layer. It’s tempting to move straight to the task: who’s doing what, by when. But a team that hasn’t built any real sense of who its people are has nothing to draw on later, when the work gets harder and the politeness runs out.
5. Leaving roles and expectations implicit. Ambiguity here doesn’t disappear, it just goes underground. It resurfaces in Storming as territorial disputes, duplicated effort, or quiet resentment about who’s “really” responsible for what — problems that trace straight back to a Forming stage that assumed things were obvious when they weren’t.

Why it matters more than it looks like it does

Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team puts absence of trust at the base of the pyramid, underneath everything else — and trust isn’t something a team arrives with. It’s built, deliberately, starting in Forming. Skip that groundwork and every dysfunction above it becomes more likely: teams that avoid conflict because they never built the safety to have it, that commit half-heartedly because they were never genuinely heard, that dodge accountability because responsibilities were never properly settled in the first place.

What good Forming actually looks like

Good Forming is deliberate, and it’s slower than most leaders are comfortable with. Purpose, roles and working norms get discussed explicitly, not assumed. The leader stays visibly present and directive without becoming overbearing, and checks understanding rather than assuming it’s landed.

It’s also, in our experience, rarely built in a meeting room. People form real working trust fastest through genuine shared experience — doing something together that asks something real of them — not through another round of introductions over coffee. That’s the thinking behind taking teams outdoors at this stage rather than later: time in nature, working through something unfamiliar together, tends to build in days what a conference room builds in months, if it builds it at all.

Get Forming right, and the stages that follow are often easier work, not harder — because the team now has an actual foundation to build on, rather than more structure to improvise around as problems surface.

If you’re bringing a newly formed team together and want to get this stage right from day one, our Newly Forming Teams work is built specifically for this. You can also read more on how this connects to the Five Dysfunctions of a Team.