Coaching through the stages of team development
The Three Phase Approach
Episode 7 of the Teams Transformed podcast
Teams Transformed is the podcast for courageous coaches, curious leaders, and anyone passionate about unlocking the true power of teams. Hosted by TCS Founder and Senior Faculty Georgina Woudstra and Allard De Jong, listen to explore transformational insights on how to coach teams with presence, depth, and emergence, diving into not just the tools, but the art of team coaching itself.
About this Episode
In the seventh episode of Teams Transformed, Georgina and Allard explore the stages of team development through a Gestalt lens. Moving beyond traditional models like Tuckman's forming-storming-norming-performing, they reveal how understanding beginnings, middles, and endings can transform how coaches intervene and support teams through their natural evolution. This practical framework helps coaches recognise where teams are in their development and what's needed to guide them forward.
Through personal stories and real examples, they demonstrate how teams move from polite harmony through necessary conflict to genuine cohesion and why each stage matters for team effectiveness.
Key Themes Explored
Beyond Tuckman: A Gestalt Perspective
While acknowledging the value of traditional team development models, Georgina introduces the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland's approach: orientation and inclusion (beginnings), differentiation (middles), and cohesion (endings). This framework applies not just to a team's lifespan, but to individual coaching sessions, workshops, and project cycles. The beauty lies in its simplicity - every team gathering has a beginning, middle, and end that coaches can navigate intentionally.
Beginnings: Orientation and inclusion
The beginning stage is characterised by anxiety, social posturing, and self-focused attention. Team members wonder: Will I fit in? What are the rules? Can I speak up? Georgina describes showing up in "mode one" (facilitator mode) to provide clarity, structure, and safety. The critical work is getting everyone's voice in the room - not as a technique, but because people haven't truly arrived until they've made contact. The hosts emphasise meeting teams at "depth one or two" of the swimming pool metaphor, avoiding the temptation to prize away protection too quickly.
Middles: The necessary work of differentiation
Differentiation emerges when someone breaks the spell of polite harmony - disagreeing, expressing boredom, or challenging another perspective. Allard reframes conflict as "an indication that the team is actually growing and maturing." Rather than competing opinions being right or wrong, they represent different figures that need voice and support. The hosts describe interventions that "fatten" dissenting voices and create exchanges between differing perspectives in front of the team. This stage is where withholding transforms into useful data that can actually change the team's course.
The cost of withdrawing
Georgina highlights the organisational impact of executive teams where members withhold crucial thoughts and feelings during meetings. Given the collective cost of senior time and the significance of their decisions, effectiveness becomes impossible without surfacing what's really present. The hosts address the common phenomenon of someone voicing concerns in the last two minutes when there's no opportunity to change course, revealing the team's inability to make use of available data in real time.
Endings: Cohesion and integration
The cohesion stage represents integration of learning into a new team identity. Unlike the false harmony of beginnings, this cohesion preserves individual voice while placing the "I" in service of the "we." Distributed leadership emerges, with team members taking acts of leadership throughout meetings rather than depending solely on the designated leader. Healthy norms have been consciously developed and remain open to review. The hosts note how this stage requires integration work. Without it, teams revert to their starting point next time they gather.
Learning through experience
Allard shares how the TCS diploma createa real teams of 4-5 participants working on projects together, allowing coaches to develop a "felt sense" of these stages. Watching differentiation and cohesion play out repeatedly in these small teams gives practitioners embodied understanding of how and when to intervene. Georgina describes how these teams become aware of their own conflict styles and eventually reach a place where they can be forthright with each other and play to strengths.
Key takeaways
📍 Simple Framework: Beginnings (orientation/inclusion), middles (differentiation), and endings (cohesion) apply to team lifespans, programs, and individual sessions.
🎭 Meeting Teams Where They Are: In beginnings, provide structure and clarity; avoid forcing vulnerability too quickly or you'll encounter resistance and survival mode.
⚔️ Conflict as Growth: Differentiation and constructive conflict are necessary stages. Without them, teams never reach full potential.
💬 Surface the Withholding: The middle stage work is making invisible data visible so it can be useful rather than emerging too late to matter.
🤝 Evolved Cohesion: True cohesion preserves individual voice while placing "I" in service of "we" unlike the false harmony of polite beginnings.
📊 Read the System: Teams reveal when they're ready to shift stages. Coaches don't impose the transition by design but watch for phenomena that signal readiness.
🏊 The Swimming Pool: Use depth levels (1-4) to gauge how much vulnerability and openness is appropriate for where the team is developmentally.
Why listen?
Listen for a practical, memorable framework for understanding team dynamics that goes beyond theoretical models to inform real-time coaching decisions. This podcast:
Reframes conflict as a sign of team maturation rather than something to avoid, giving coaches permission to support differentiation actively.
Offers specific guidance on how to intervene differently at each stage, from providing structure in beginnings to supporting exchanges in middles to facilitating integration in endings.
Addresses the organisational cost of teams that never move beyond polite harmony, making the case for why this developmental work matters.
The episode concludes with an invitation to listeners: reflect on a team you're working with or are part of - what stage of development are you at, and what might support you in shifting to the next stage?
About your hosts
Georgina Woudstra is the Founder and Senior Faculty of Team Coaching Studio, an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) with over 20 years of experience. Georgina is recognised globally as one of the leading lights in team coaching and was among the first coaches to receive ICF's Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching.
Allard De Jong is a seasoned leadership development expert with two decades of experience solving organisational 'people problems' and accelerating leadership development. He brings a unique perspective on transformative inquiry and divergent thinking to team coaching practice.
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