From Forming to Performing: How Confluence Supports Every Stage of Team Development

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I recently revisited Bruce Tuckman’s model of team development — a simple but powerful way to understand how groups grow and collaborate. The more I thought about it, the more I saw its patterns reflected in everyday teamwork inside Confluence. Each stage brings its own challenges, and the way teams use tools can make that journey easier or harder.

Using this model offers more than theory — it gives a structured way to observe what’s happening in a team. Instead of guessing why collaboration feels difficult, leaders can step back and look at their teams through the lens of these stages. It helps to see patterns more clearly: where the group might be stuck, what kind of support they need, and how tools like Confluence can guide them forward.

In this article, I’d like to reflect on how different features in Confluence — and the Atlassian marketplace app Workflows for Confluence (built by my colleagues here at AppFox) — can help teams move through each stage more effectively.

Forming: A New Beginning (with Unclear Rules)

The Forming stage is where everything begins. A new team comes together, often with different backgrounds, working styles, and expectations. There’s excitement and curiosity, but also uncertainty. People are polite and careful. They are still learning about their roles and how to work together.

The main struggles at this stage are:

• Unclear goals or responsibilities
• Hesitation to share or edit content
• Inconsistent communication
• Fear of ‘doing something wrong’ in shared tools

How Confluence helps:

• A clear space homepage introduces the project, goals, and key pages.
• A team directory page builds visibility and trust.
• Templates for onboarding, meetings, and decisions help everyone start from the same baseline.

How the Workflows for Confluence app helps here:

• Use draft → in review → published states to give contributors confidence — they know their content won’t go live until reviewed.
• Set page reviewers to guide new team members.
• Enable notifications for page transitions to show progress and reinforce a sense of momentum.

The goal here is to create safety. When people know there’s a structure that supports them, they’re more likely to contribute and explore.

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Storming: When Differences Surface

In the Storming stage, teams face tension. Opinions differ, priorities clash, and processes are challenged. It’s a natural part of development, but without the right environment, it can turn into frustration or silence.

Typical challenges:

• Lack of alignment on goals
• Confusion around ownership
• Conflicting feedback
• Siloed communication

How Confluence helps:

• Use decision logs and project summary pages to make agreements visible.
• Encourage inline comments and page discussions to turn disagreement into dialogue.

How Workflows for Confluence helps:

• Define reviewers and approvers clearly in the workflow to avoid confusion about final responsibility.
• Use workflow history to track who made changes and when — creating transparency without blame.
• Enforce approval comments or rejection reasons to make decision-making visible and reduce back-and-forth conflicts.

At this stage, structure is not about control — it’s about clarity. Workflows give teams a neutral framework that keeps discussions focused on the work, not on the people.

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Norming: Building Shared Rhythm and Structure

After conflict comes clarity. In the Norming stage, teams start to agree on how they work together. Roles are clearer, trust grows, and communication becomes more natural. People start saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I’.

At this point, the amount of content in Confluence usually increases. Teams create more pages — project plans, meeting notes, documentation — and without structure, things can quickly become messy. The challenge now is not a lack of collaboration, but a lack of clarity.

Common pain points:

• Information scattered across spaces
• Duplicated or outdated pages
• Difficulty finding the right version
• Unclear ownership of content

How Confluence helps:

• Use page labels, content trees, and consistent naming for navigation.
• Document team agreements and processes to align ways of working.

How the Workflows for Confluence app helps:

• Introduce content review cycles so pages are checked regularly.
• Use expiry dates or automatic status changes to prevent outdated information from staying live.
• Set up Official Versioning in Workflows for Confluence for regulated documentation — to tailor rules to different content types.

Now, workflows move from being a safety net to a system of governance — keeping growing knowledge organized and trusted.

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Performing: Flow and Autonomy

In the Performing stage, collaboration feels natural. The team focuses on outcomes, not just process. There’s trust, ownership, and confidence. Tools become almost invisible — they simply support the flow of work.

Potential risks:

• Losing discipline as things run smoothly
• Knowledge staying in people’s heads
• No onboarding process for new members

How Confluence helps:

• Create knowledge hubs or ‘How We Work’ spaces.
• Encourage lightweight retrospectives and celebration pages for wins.

How the Workflows for Confluence app helps:

• Use templates with metadata and labels to create pages consistently
• Use workflow triggers connected to labels or space/page properties to scale content management efficiently.

At this stage, workflows become part of the background — quietly keeping the system running while people focus on creativity and delivery.

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Adjourning: Closing and Reflecting

Every project or phase eventually ends. In the Adjourning stage, people wrap up work, transfer knowledge, and move on. Reflection here is just as important as planning was in the beginning.

How Confluence helps:

• Run retrospectives and store lessons learned for future projects.
• Archive old spaces or use restricted access to keep active work areas focused.

How Workflows for Confluence helps:

• Create ‘Completed’ or ‘Archived’ states to mark finalized pages.
• Automate page archiving after a set period of inactivity.

Closure isn’t just about finishing — it’s about learning and making space for what’s next.

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Final Reflection

It’s also important to remember that teams don’t move through these stages in a straight line. Change, new members, or shifting goals can push them to revisit earlier phases. Teams often oscillate between forming and storming, or between norming and performing — and that’s completely normal. The value of Tuckman’s model is that it helps us recognize what’s happening and respond with the right level of structure, support, and transparency.

Tuckman’s model helps us see the bigger picture — where the team stands and what kind of support it needs. Confluence can do more than just store information; it can mirror and guide how teams evolve. And when combined with tools like Workflows for Confluence, it helps maintain clarity, accountability, and rhythm — one stage, one page, one workflow at a time.