Team Building
This domain tests whether you can build a team deliberately: set direction, choose roles, run the stages of group development, and create the conditions for candour. Items present a new team, a team that has gone quiet, or a cross-functional group that is politicking, and ask for the leader's next intervention.
Stages of development (Tuckman)
Forming - polite, dependent, unclear roles. Storming - disagreement about goals, influence and ways of working; this is normal, not failure. Norming - shared rules emerge. Performing - the team self-manages around the task. Adjourning - disbanding and recognition. Leaders who suppress storming tend to get a polite, low-candour team that avoids hard decisions.
Conditions that matter
- A clear, shared goal and explicit roles (RACI, or Belbin's nine team roles for balance of contribution).
- Psychological safety: people can raise errors and dissent without punishment.
- Agreed working norms - meeting cadence, decision rights, how conflict is handled.
- Trust built through small commitments kept, not through one off-site.
Worked example
A new cross-functional team of eight misses its first two deadlines. The leader's instinct is a team-building day. A better read: the team is in storming with unresolved role ambiguity. The intervention is a working session to agree the goal, clarify who decides what, set a meeting and escalation rhythm, and surface the disagreement between operations and sales about priorities. The off-site comes later, once norms exist, to celebrate progress. Reasoning: team building is a process of structuring work and relationships, not an event; a fun day on top of unclear roles usually entrenches the same problems.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating storming as a sign the team is failing and shutting down dissent.
- Substituting social events for role clarity, decision rights and goals.
- Using Belbin or personality labels as fixed role assignments rather than a balance check.
- Letting team size drift; coordination costs rise sharply beyond roughly eight to ten members.
- Avoiding conflict until it becomes personal, which is when relationship conflict is hardest to repair.