Diagnosing The Development Stage of Your General Agency
As a general agent, your job is to motivate, educate, and support a group of agents so that they can support their families and so you can support yours. Often times, it is better to use more than just your head to identify problems and solve them, and your best resources are your agents. You have probably tried this at times, and been frustrated. But there is hope. You can use the table below to diagnose where you stand as a team. If you diagnose correctly, you can persuade your agents to have patience with each other while you slowly elevate the performance of all of them.
(Stone Hill is still looking for the authors/sources of this information so that it can be properly attributed.)
Table of 5 Phases of Group Development
| Common Operating Characteristics During Stages of Group Development | |||||
| STAGES | |||||
| ISSUES | I MEMBERSHIP | II SUBGROUPING | III CONFRONTATION | IV INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENTIATION | V COLLABORATION |
| Atmosphere and relationships | Cautiousness | Greater closeness within subgroups | Close within subgroups, hostility between subgroups | Confidence and satisfaction | Supportive and open |
| Goal understanding and acceptance | Unclear | Some greater clarity, but misperceptions likely | Fought over | Agreed upon | Commitment |
| Listening and information sharing | Intense but high distortion and low sharing | Within subgroups, similarities over perceived | Poor | Fairly good | Good |
| Disagreement and conflict | Not likely to emerge; if it does, will be angry and chaotic | False unanimity | Frequent | Based on honest differences | Resolved as it occurs |
| Decision making | Dominated by more active members | Fragmented, deadlocks | Based on power | Based on individual expertise | Collective when all resources needed, individual when one expert |
| Evaluation of performance | Done by all, but not shared | Across subgroups | Highly judgmental | Done as basis for differentiation but with respect | Open, shared, developmental |
| Expression of feelings | Avoided, suppressed | Positive only within subgroups, mild ‘digs’ across groupings | Coming out, anger | Increasingly open | Expressed openly |
| Division of labor | Little, if any | Struggles over jobs | Differentiation resisted | High differentiation based on expertise | Differentiation and integration, as appropriate |
| Leadership | Disjointed | Resisted | Power struggles common | Structured or shared | Shared |
| Attention to process | Ignored | Noticed but avoided | Used as weapon | Attended to compulsively or too uncritically | Attended to as appropriate |
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