Unclear Expectations and Norms: When professionalism is preached but never practiced or defined. Expecting “professionalism” without defining it leads to confusion and inconsistent accountability.
Our final element in the Big 10 Culture Killers of Effective Leadership Teams, which I call Foggy Norms, Frayed Trust, naturally follows from The Wisdom Gap discussed in the last two blogs. The Wisdom Gap refers to a leadership dysfunction in which leaders trust their personal ideals so much that they neglect to seek balance and nuance through the wise counsel of their team. When leaders are deeply passionate and convinced of their ideals, they can become myopic, arrogantly believing their perspective is “the right way.” They often feel offended and confused when others don’t see it the same way. This can be highly damaging for teams that struggle to establish explicit norms, almost as if team members are expected to read the leader’s mind to understand how to think, act, and behave.
Let me speak frankly to those of you who hold positions of authority and power in your teams and organizations: It is highly unethical and unfair to hold your people accountable for your implicit ideals that have not undergone the forging process of becoming explicit team norms. Until that forging process has happened, your ideals are valuable only to you! Making judgments about your team’s attitudes or behaviors based on your ideals is a gross injustice and an abuse of power.
Now, I’ve expressed this quite boldly because I believe most leaders are naive about when they do this. They may pride themselves on their sharp intuitions, integrity, and “fair-minded” judgments, but they are blind to the ambiguity and confusion they create for their teams. If you ask their team, they most likely will say they feel unheard, disempowered, confused, and frustrated. Why? Because they do not know how to think, act, or make decisions that their leader will support. They have no idea when their actions or decisions will be seen as out of step with their leader’s standards or the organizational philosophies. They are afraid to act for fear of getting reprimanded, or worse, fired.
If your organizational philosophies are just lofty ideals and abstract concepts written on paper, disconnected from clear procedural guidance that enables your team to act in line with organizational values, then your philosophies are meaningless. For your philosophies to have any value, they should not only present a vision of your ideal organization but should also serve as roadmaps for shaping your organizational culture toward that vision.
I once faced a prolonged situation with a team member whose conduct consistently undermined my leadership role. For two years, I tried to respond with humility—listening carefully, acknowledging their concerns, and even apologizing when my actions were perceived negatively—yet the behavior persisted. When it became clear that informal efforts were ineffective and a more formal organizational process was required, I paused my regular meetings with this individual to focus on establishing clear, organizationally sanctioned norms for how we ought to work together. To my surprise, one of my colleagues confronted me, insisting that pausing these meetings showed no self-reflection and violated the organization’s leadership philosophy. Somehow, I violated this individual’s ideals for managing and balancing conflict with my ongoing job responsibilities. I was stunned: there were no explicit norms for how leaders should manage conflict or rebuild trust, yet my decisions were judged against unspoken expectations. In that moment, I was disempowered, not because of my employee’s behavior, but because foggy organizational norms left me without a clear framework to lead with integrity, establish trust, and set our working relationship on a healthier path.
Tuckman’s team formation model describes how groups evolve through predictable stages to become effective and cohesive. Developed by psychologist Bruce Tuckman in 1965, the model outlines four initial phases—Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing—later expanded to include a fifth stage, Adjourning. In the Forming stage, members come together and begin orienting themselves to tasks and one another. Storming follows, marked by conflict and power struggles as roles and expectations are tested. With Norming, the team establishes more explicit norms, trust, and collaboration. In Performing, the group operates at its highest level, achieving goals with efficiency and synergy. Finally, Adjourning marks the team’s dissolution once objectives are met. This model highlights that conflict and ambiguity are natural parts of team growth, but by progressing through these stages, groups can build trust, clarify expectations, and reach peak performance.
The essential lesson in this model is that team performance requires the team to storm, and through those storms, to establish explicit norms that will help them move forward together effectively. We cannot skip forming directly to norming without negatively affecting team performance. Teams that try to do this are no more than merely work groups, not high-performing missional teams. A tell-tale sign that your team is nothing more than a work team is when each person only shares about their own concerns without inviting discussion. They do not consider how their efforts impact others, either positively or negatively. They ignore the coherence and unity of the entire organizational system, in which all parts work together toward a single mission with alignment and mutual commitment. On the surface, these teams seem healthy; at least there is a thin veneer of everyone getting along. But when someone raises concerns or critiques, the team cannot tolerate the dissonance it causes. The “troublemakers” are sanctioned and criticized simply for not staying in their lane.
This is a common situation for most organizational teams. They are vulnerable to Foggy Norms and Frayed Trust. Teams that lack emotional intelligence and resilience to face the inevitable storming with confidence and mutual commitment will eventually fade away. They don’t have enough missional courage to shoulder the weight of the unified, organizational mission that’s been entrusted to them.
We need leadership teams with courageous hearts and soulful presence to remain engaged when the storming begins. Storming often reveals unexamined leadership ideals that damage trust by creating perplexity. It can surface implicit expectations so the team can honestly face them: clarifying and addressing the issues, repenting where needed, and recommitting to finding a better way that builds trust rather than destroys it. This process also re-empowers those who have been too afraid to speak up for fear of backlash.
Let me return to my assertion: It is highly unethical and unfair to hold your people accountable for your implicit ideals that have not undergone the forging process of becoming explicit team norms.
Dear team leaders, it is your responsibility to ensure that when storming begins on your team, you guide it carefully so the team doesn’t avoid it but faces it head-on and navigates through it with hopefulness of becoming a stronger team on the other side of it. Do not shirk this responsibility! You may be tempted to take offense when your pride and ego are threatened. When that happens, you need to listen to your team, serve them with respect (not talking down to them), and with love that dares to believe the best about your people and not give up on them. To silence them or put them in their place is not their failure but yours. Let the forging process continue!
Here are 10 suggestions for how to shepherd your team through the storming phase of team formation toward the establishment of explicit norms that will strengthen your team’s wisdom, trust, and community:
- Name the Storm, Don’t Avoid It: Acknowledge conflict as a natural stage of growth rather than a failure, normalizing storming as part of the team’s journey.
- Surface Implicit Ideals: Encourage open dialogue that brings hidden assumptions and unspoken expectations into the light so that they can be examined together.
- Forge Explicit Norms: Guide the team in clarifying shared standards of professionalism, communication, and accountability, turning ideals into agreed-upon practices.
- Model Humility and Self-Reflection: Demonstrate willingness to listen, admit missteps, and adjust. This sets the tone for others to follow suit.
- Correct in Private, Affirm in Public: Protect dignity by addressing issues one-on-one, while publicly affirming contributions to build morale and trust.
- Empower Voices of Dissonance: Create a safe space for “troublemakers” or dissenters to speak without fear of sanction, reframing critique as a gift to the team.
- Hold Authority Lightly: Resist micromanaging or imposing personal preferences. Instead, empower officers and team members to lead within their roles.
- Shepherd Emotional Dynamics: Attend to the emotional undercurrents of conflict with respect and empathy, ensuring the team doesn’t fracture under pressure.
- Recommit to Mission Together: Anchor discussions in the shared purpose of the team, reminding members that storming is in service of the larger mission.
- Transform Storming into Wisdom: Treat conflict as the crucible where trust is forged, norms are clarified, and the team matures into a community capable of carrying the mission with courage and coherence.
Storming is not a threat to leadership teams but the crucible in which clarity and trust are forged. When leaders courageously shepherd their people through the storms, implicit ideals become explicit norms, and the team emerges wiser, stronger, and more united in mission.
