The Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model

Most Teams Do Not Fail at Execution. They Fail at Everything That Should Have Come Before It.

There is a familiar pattern in organisational life that anyone who has worked with teams will recognise. A project is launched with enthusiasm. People are assigned. Deadlines are set. Work begins. And then, somewhere around week three, things start to unravel. Communication breaks down, priorities conflict, people quietly disengage, and someone in a leadership role wonders aloud why the team “just can’t seem to gel.” The usual diagnosis is a problem of execution, of skills, of individuals. But the real problem, more often than not, is that the team never properly formed in the first place. They jumped to the doing without attending to the being.

The Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model offers a way to understand this pattern, and more importantly, to do something about it. It is a seven-stage framework that maps the arc of team development from the moment people first come together through to sustained high performance and, eventually, the question of whether and how to continue.

What distinguishes it from other models in this space is its visual architecture, its diagnostic precision, and its insistence that every stage of team life has both a healthy resolution and an unhealthy one.

Origins: The Grove and the Visual Turn

The model was developed by Allan Drexler and David Sibbet, and published through The Grove Consultants International in 1994. Sibbet, in particular, is known for his pioneering work in visual facilitation and graphic recording, the practice of capturing group thinking in real time through large-scale visual maps. This matters because the Drexler-Sibbet model was not conceived as a list to be read in a textbook; it was designed as a large-format visual tool, a wall-sized graphic that teams could literally stand in front of and use to locate themselves in their developmental journey.

This visual emphasis is not incidental. Sibbet’s broader body of work, articulated in Visual Teams (2011), argues that graphic tools can make invisible group dynamics visible, giving teams a shared language for experiences that are otherwise difficult to discuss. When a team member can point to a stage on a wall chart and say “I think we’re stuck here,” it changes the conversation entirely. The abstraction becomes concrete. The feeling becomes diagnosable.

The Seven Stages

The model proposes that teams move through seven stages, each characterised by a central question that members are, consciously or otherwise, trying to answer. Critically, each stage has a resolved state (what it looks like when the team has successfully navigated the stage) and an unresolved state (what happens when they have not). The unresolved states are not merely the absence of progress; they are active dysfunctions that produce specific, recognisable symptoms.

Stage 1: Orientation (Why am I here?)

Before anyone can commit to a team, they need to understand why the team exists and why they, specifically, are part of it. The resolved state is a sense of purpose and belonging. The unresolved state is disorientation, uncertainty, and a lingering suspicion that one’s presence might be arbitrary.

This stage is astonishingly easy to skip, and astonishingly common to skip badly. We have seen project teams launched with a brief email and a shared calendar invite, as though the mere act of scheduling a meeting constitutes purpose. It does not.

Stage 2: Trust Building (Who are you?)

Once people know why they are there, they need to know who they are working with, not just names and job titles, but something of each other’s competence, reliability, and character. The resolved state is mutual regard and a willingness to be open. The unresolved state is caution, guardedness, and the kind of surface-level politeness that masks genuine wariness. Trust, as we have argued elsewhere, is the load-bearing wall of team performance. Skip this stage and you can build something that looks impressive, but it will not survive the first serious pressure.

Stage 3: Goal Clarification (What are we doing?)

This is where the team develops a shared understanding of its objectives, not just the official project brief, but a genuine collective grasp of what success looks like and what the boundaries of the work are. Resolved, this produces clarity, alignment, and the ability to make decisions without constantly escalating. Unresolved, it produces apathy, competing assumptions, and the peculiar phenomenon of everyone being busy but no one being sure they are working on the same thing.

Stage 4: Commitment (How will we do it?)

Having agreed on the what, the team must now negotiate the how: roles, processes, decision-making authority, norms, and the allocation of resources. The resolved state is a sense of shared ownership and clear agreements. The unresolved state is dependency, resistance, and the passive-aggressive undermining that occurs when people feel they were never genuinely consulted (which, to be direct about it, usually means they were not).

This is the stage where many teams discover that their earlier consensus was more fragile than they thought, because it is one thing to agree on a destination and quite another to agree on who drives.

Stage 5: Implementation (Who does what, when, where?)

This is the stage most organisations are desperate to reach, and the one they most frequently try to begin at. Implementation is the visible work: tasks assigned, deadlines met, deliverables produced. When the preceding stages have been properly resolved, implementation tends to flow with a kind of energised efficiency. When they have not, it produces the all-too-familiar experience of a team that is technically working but functionally stuck, characterised by missed handoffs, duplicated effort, and the quiet accumulation of resentment.

Stage 6: High Performance (Wow!)

This is the stage every leadership book promises and few teams actually sustain. High performance in the Drexler-Sibbet model is characterised by spontaneous interaction, surpassing results, and a collective sense of synergy. The team is not merely executing; it is exceeding its own expectations, often in ways that surprise its members.

It is worth noting (and the model is honest about this) that high performance is not a permanent state. It is a peak that teams reach when conditions are right, and from which they will inevitably descend, either through natural completion or through disruption.

Stage 7: Renewal (Why continue?)

The final stage asks a question that most teams never think to ask until it is too late: should this team continue, and if so, in what form? Renewal involves reflecting on what has been accomplished, acknowledging what has changed, and making deliberate choices about the future. The resolved state is a sense of recognition and the capacity to either evolve or conclude with dignity. The unresolved state is burnout, boredom, and the slow dissolution that occurs when a team has outlived its purpose but no one has the courage to say so.

The Resolved and Unresolved Dynamic

One of the model’s more sophisticated features is its insistence that each stage is not simply passed through but resolved or left unresolved, and that unresolved stages do not simply represent stalled progress but generate their own characteristics.

• A team with unresolved trust, for instance, does not simply lack warmth; it actively develops workarounds, political behaviour, and information hoarding.
• A team with unresolved goals does not simply lack direction; it generates competing interpretations that surface as conflict during implementation.

This binary framing is, admittedly, somewhat blunt (reality is rarely as clean as a two-column table), but its practical utility is considerable. When a team is struggling, the model provides a structured way to ask: which stage is unresolved? What symptoms are we seeing? And what would it take to go back and do the foundational work properly? That last question is important, because it implies something that many teams and their leaders resist: sometimes the right thing to do is to stop going forward and go back.

How This Differs from Tuckman

Anyone familiar with team development literature will immediately notice a family resemblance to Tuckman’s forming-storming-norming-performing model (1965), and the comparison is worth drawing out, because the two frameworks illuminate different things.

Tuckman’s model is primarily descriptive. It captures the emotional and relational arc of group development: the initial politeness of forming, the conflict of storming, the emergent cohesion of norming, and the productive maturity of performing. It is intuitively appealing, widely taught, and has the considerable virtue of normalising conflict as a necessary part of team development. But it is also, by design, quite broad. It tells you roughly where a team is in its emotional journey; it is less helpful in telling you what to do about it.

The Drexler-Sibbet model offers a more granular and action-oriented alternative. Where Tuckman gives you four (later five, with “adjourning“) broad phases, Drexler and Sibbet give you seven specific stages, each with a diagnostic question, a resolved state, and an unresolved state. Where Tuckman describes what the team feels, Drexler-Sibbet describes what the team needs. The two are complementary rather than competing: Tuckman tells you the weather, Drexler-Sibbet gives you the forecast and a suggested packing list.

There is also a structural difference worth noting. Tuckman’s model is essentially linear (teams progress from forming to performing), even though most practitioners acknowledge that regression happens. The Drexler-Sibbet model builds regression into its architecture. A team can be at Stage 5 and find itself thrown back to Stage 2 when a key member leaves, or back to Stage 3 when the organisational strategy shifts. This is not a failure of the model; it is a feature.

Why the Early Stages Get Skipped

If there is a single insight from this model that deserves to be printed on every project charter and pinned above every meeting room whiteboard, it is this: Stages 1 through 4 are where most team failures originate, and they are the stages most consistently rushed, truncated, or ignored.

The reasons are not mysterious. Organisations reward visible output. Managers are under pressure to deliver. “Building trust” and “clarifying goals” do not appear on Gantt charts. There is a pervasive cultural assumption, particularly in fast-moving or results-oriented environments, that the human dynamics of teamwork will sort themselves out if people just get on with it. They will not. Or rather, they will sort themselves out, but often in ways that are dysfunctional rather than productive.

We have worked with teams who spent months in painful, conflict-ridden implementation only to discover, when they finally stopped to diagnose the problem, that the real issue was a fundamental disagreement about goals that had never been surfaced (Stage 3), or a lack of trust between two key members that had been papered over with professionalism but never addressed (Stage 2). The time “saved” by skipping the foundational stages was paid back with interest, as it almost always is. “Measure twice, cut once”, as they say.

Regression: When Teams Go Backwards

One of the model’s most practically useful features is its explicit acknowledgement that teams do not only move forward. They regress, sometimes dramatically, and understanding why is essential for anyone leading or facilitating team development.

Common triggers for regression include:

• Membership changes. When a key member leaves or a new one arrives, the team is, in a meaningful sense, a different team. Trust must be renegotiated, roles reassigned, and sometimes goals revisited. The tendency to simply “slot someone in” and carry on as before is understandable but often counterproductive.
• Goal shifts. When organisational priorities change, the team’s mandate may shift beneath its feet. A team that had achieved genuine goal clarity can find itself back at Stage 3, trying to answer the question “what are we actually doing now?” all over again.
• Trust breaches. When trust is broken, whether through a specific incident or a gradual erosion, the team is pulled back to Stage 2 regardless of how far it had progressed. This is particularly painful for teams that had reached high performance, because the contrast between what they had and what they have lost is acute.
• Leadership transitions. A new leader, however competent, resets much of the relational architecture of the team. The team must re-establish orientation, rebuild trust with the new leader, and often renegotiate commitments.

The model’s value here is not in preventing regression (which is often unavoidable) but in providing a framework for understanding it. When a team recognises that it has regressed to an earlier stage, it can respond purposefully rather than panicking or pretending the problem does not exist.

Practical Applications

The Drexler-Sibbet model lends itself to a range of practical applications, several of which we have found particularly valuable:

Team launches and project kickoffs. Rather than launching a team with a brief and a timeline, use the model to design a deliberate onboarding process that addresses Stages 1 through 4 before pushing into implementation. This need not take weeks; even a few hours of structured conversation about purpose, relationships, goals, and ways of working can make a significant difference.

Diagnosing stuck teams. When a team is underperforming, the model provides a structured diagnostic. Walk through the seven stages and ask: where is the unresolved issue? Is it a trust problem? A clarity problem? A commitment problem? The answer is almost never “people are just not working hard enough,” though that is invariably the first hypothesis offered.

Merger and integration. When teams are merged or restructured, the model reminds us that the resulting group is, developmentally speaking, starting from scratch. The individuals may have been high-performing in their previous teams, but this team is new, and it needs to go through its own developmental process. Treating a merged team as though it should immediately function at Stage 5 is a recipe for frustration.

New leader transitions. When a team gets a new leader, the model provides a roadmap for the integration period. The new leader needs to attend to orientation and trust before pushing for changes to goals or processes. Leaders who arrive and immediately begin restructuring (which is surprisingly common) are essentially attempting to resolve Stage 4 without having done the work of Stages 1 through 3.

Facilitation and team development. The visual format of the original model makes it an excellent facilitation tool. Placing the model on a wall and asking team members to independently identify where they think the team is, and then discussing the results, can surface disagreements and insights that no amount of conventional meeting discussion would produce.

Limitations Worth Acknowledging

No model should be adopted uncritically, and this one is no exception. The seven stages, while more granular than Tuckman’s four, still impose a degree of sequential logic on processes that are, in reality, overlapping, iterative, and occasionally chaotic. Trust building does not stop when goal clarification begins; orientation questions can resurface at any point. The model’s stages are better understood as ongoing concerns than as boxes to be ticked and left behind.

There is also the question of empirical validation. The Drexler-Sibbet model was developed through consulting practice and facilitation experience rather than through controlled research. It draws on established theory (including Tuckman, and the broader group dynamics literature), but it does not have the kind of extensive independent empirical validation that some other frameworks enjoy. This does not make it wrong, but it does mean it should be held with the epistemological humility appropriate to a practitioner-developed tool rather than treated as settled science.

Learning More

To go deeper, explore these resources on people-shift.com:

• Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing
• A Group or a Team: What’s the Difference?
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Lencioni’s Framework for Effective Teams
• Cog’s Ladder: Another Framework for Team Development Stages
• Trust: An Introduction

The People Shift View

At PeopleShift, we find the Drexler-Sibbet model one of the more honest frameworks in the team development space, precisely because it takes seriously the work that most organisations are desperate to skip. The early stages, orientation, trust, goal clarification, commitment, are not preliminary throat-clearing before the “real work” begins. They are the real work. Everything that follows either rests on that foundation or collapses for want of it.

What we particularly value is the model’s refusal to pretend that team development is a one-way journey. Teams go backwards. They get disrupted. They lose members, gain new ones, absorb shifting mandates, and survive leadership changes. A framework that cannot accommodate this reality is of limited practical use, however elegant it looks in a classroom. The Drexler-Sibbet model accommodates it, and gives teams a language for talking about what is happening to them without descending into blame or abstraction.

If you lead a team, or facilitate one, or have ever sat in a meeting wondering why a group of individually capable people cannot seem to produce anything collectively worthwhile, this model is worth your time. Not because it will solve the problem for you, but because it will almost certainly help you see where the problem actually is. And seeing clearly, in our experience, is more than half the battle.