Aiming to accomplish outstanding results as a logistics company, managers should be more than just managers, assuming a leading position that encourages and supports team development.

Quite often, this is an unknown strategy and logisticians run their operations based on a more traditional model. However, in order to contribute to the overall success of an organization, implementing this course of development is very important.

If you are not familiar with the concept of team development, here is a brief explanation: it consists of 5 stages of leadership and development that a company should follow to build a cohesive team and guarantee successful operations. At each stage, the business will face different challenges and come up with a way to overcome them through actions executed as a group.

The first thing to do in order to carry out team development at your company is having a leader. The leader will be in charge of supporting the group and adapting their behavior to the changing and developing needs encountered at each stage.

Having an effective leadership is essential for the group to have some guidance throughout the stages and progress as a whole. Below, you can find what the stages consist of and how a leader should act in each one of them. Check it out!

Stages of Team Development

1) Forming

The initial stage of team development consists of forming the group in charge of achieving a certain goal or developing a specific operation. At this phase, the members share an intention and the will to fulfill it by working together. However, the course of action is still uncertain.

Since the team members’ roles and responsibilities aren’t clear at this stage, as a leader, it is your job to make sure you help each person involved understand how they can contribute to accomplishing the collective objective and find individual interest and purpose behind the established mission.

2) Storming

This is the stage that happens right after the introduction stage, where everyone involved in the development of an operation already understands their roles in achieving the pre-determined mission. Then, it is time to start putting a course of action into practice.

However, seeing that this is a collective effort, and each person has a different work approach and ways of getting things done, it is natural that some conflicts happen. The leadership role at this stage is making sure there is a clear and proper communication between all of the involved, reducing tension within the team, managing conflicts and leading by example.

3) Norming

Gradually, the team moves into the norming stage. At this phase, your team members already understand their roles and respect your authority as a leader. They are also more used to dealing with each other’s differences, having found a good balance between the individual strengths of all the parties involved.

This is when the first results start appearing, and consequently, encouraging everyone to develop a stronger sense of commitment and realization that their work is actually contributing to achieving the team’s purpose.

At this stage, the leader’s role is to motivate team members with results, show them you are on the right path and be always open to hearing constructive feedbacks. This will make your team members value the project even more!

4) Performing

The performing stage comes when your team is moving forward to reaching even greater results and coming closer to completing the mission. At this stage, the leader’s main role is to ensure that all the processes keep happening as smoothly as they can and each part involved is contributing to the maximum of productivity possible.

As a leader, you should keep everyone motivated and not let their productivity rates decrease due to the good results already obtained. For that, remind everyone that the final mission is yet to be completed and the importance of a collective effort to get there.

5) Ending

Eventually, the team will reach the stage where the mission is complete. At this stage, it is important to acknowledge everyone’s hard work and celebrate the results achieved. As a leader, you should make sure your team understands the importance of having successfully completed the established goal and collect feedbacks as to what went right and what could still be improved for the next operations.

Then, you will be able to determine your strengths as a group, as well as each person’s individual attributes and design an even better course of action for operations in the near future.

Now, we would like to give you one last advice: knowing that every company wishes to increase their production rates as much as possible, as a leader you should try to put a lot of thought in the initial stage. Because by knowing your employees and forming a group with a good balance, you will be ensuring that the adaptation process (as known as storming phase) will be short and your company will highly benefit from long norming and performing stages, ending the operation with success.

Do you want more tips on how to increase your logistics business’ productivity and business generation? Keep posted to Twig Logistics Network’s blog!

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