Why New Teams Struggle in the First Six Months — and What to Do About It

The first six months of a team's life are almost always harder than they look from the outside. The optimism and energy that typically accompany a new team formation collide, relatively quickly, with the harder realities of working with people whose assumptions, preferences and working styles are genuinely different from one's own. What happens in that collision determines, to a significant degree, whether the team develops into something high-performing or settles into a pattern of functional but suboptimal performance that becomes progressively harder to shift.

What the Research Says

Bruce Tuckman's model of team development describes the progression from Forming through Storming to Norming and Performing. The Forming stage is characterised by politeness, optimism and a general avoidance of the differences and tensions that have not yet surfaced. Storming is characterised by the emergence of those differences: friction between working styles, negotiation of roles and influence and the testing of how the team handles disagreement.

Most new teams do not move smoothly from Storming to Norming. They get stuck in Storming or they manage the appearance of Norming, suppressing tensions that have not been properly resolved and returning to an earlier stage when pressure increases or a new challenge exposes the unresolved dynamics beneath the surface.

Specific Challenges in the First Six Months

Unspoken assumptions about working style

Every team member arrives with unconscious assumptions about how a team should operate: the appropriate pace of decision-making, the balance between individual autonomy and collective agreement, the communication formats that are most efficient and the definition of what a productive meeting looks like. These assumptions are rarely made explicit in the early stages of team formation and their collision is one of the primary sources of early-stage friction.

Role ambiguity

Even where formal roles are clearly defined, the informal roles that shape how a team actually operates are negotiated implicitly in the early weeks and months. Who leads the conversation, who challenges, who synthesises, who manages tension: these are not assigned in any onboarding document. Where that negotiation is poorly managed, it produces recurring friction around influence, recognition and contribution.

Absence of psychological safety

New teams have not yet built the trust that makes honest communication possible. Team members have insufficient data about how their colleagues will respond to disagreement, challenge or the acknowledgement of uncertainty. The natural response is caution, which reduces the quality of the team's early conversations precisely when honest, exploratory dialogue is most needed.

What Helps New Teams Develop More Effectively

The interventions that most consistently accelerate new team development address the specific causes of early-stage struggle rather than the symptoms.

A structured team development experience early in the team's life, ideally within the first three months, creates explicit shared understanding of how team members work, what they need and how they prefer to communicate. This significantly reduces the time a team spends in Storming. The Insights Discovery® framework, with its Team Wheel and shared language of the Colour Energies, provides exactly this foundation: giving new team members a structured and psychologically safe way to understand and discuss the differences that would otherwise be navigated implicitly.

Early clarity about decision-making, roles and shared goals reduces the structural ambiguity that generates role conflict over time. Regular, facilitated team conversations that name and address emerging tensions before they calcify into fixed positions build the psychological safety that early-stage teams need but rarely develop without deliberate attention.

HRC's Approach to New Team Development

At HRC, we design new team development programs that address both the structural and interpersonal dimensions of early-stage team formation. As India's first and licensed legacy Insights partner since 1996, we have found consistently that teams which invest in structured development early build their performance foundation significantly more quickly and more durably than those which rely on time and proximity alone. The first six months are an investment opportunity. Treating them as such produces returns that compound across the life of the team.

If your organisation is launching a new team or looking to accelerate an existing one's development, we would welcome a conversation.