Belbin - Team Roles

Belbin – Team Roles

Ever wonder what is the difference between a team member and a group? Imagine yourself on a beach. Suddenly, you hear a commotion and everyone springs forward rushing towards the waterfront. A man is drowning. Someone swims towards him and brings him to the sand. He is unconscious. A crowd gathered. Suddenly, everyone takes a role: everyone quickly moves from being part of a crowd to a team. A shared purpose, a common value, a purposive action forms a few of the components of a team member.

So what makes a few teams more effective and high performing than others? Is it the experience, qualifications, race, age, gender, culture that makes one team excel over others?

Meredith Belbin researched this for many years. He found that what characterized an effective team was the balance of team roles.

“A team role is a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way”, say Meredith. By being aware of our preferred team roles we become aware as team members, how we can use to our advantage our strengths and to manage our weak areas as best as we can.
He argued that a team of specialist could any day beat a team of genearlist.

Meredith identified nine team roles, as under:

1.Plant (PL 2. Resource Investigator (RI) 3. Co-ordinator (CO) 4. Shaper (SH)

5. Monitor Evaluator (ME) 6. Team Worker (TW) 7. Implementer (IMP)

8. Completer Finisher (CF) 9. Specialist (SP)

Our Personality, mental abilities, and experiences have over the years shaped us and all of the above revolve around roles around, thinking, social or action. 

Understanding one’s own preferred team role and those of team members allows for awareness of the psychological diversity in the team. In essence each of these roles are complementary to each other – together they lead to effective team behavior. With awareness, they can complement and build on each other, unaware they can contradict and compete with each other. On reflecting on SPI ( self reflection) versus Observed Scores, one can determine hidden opportunities on emergent roles one could play. 

Beyond the individual role is the Team Role Analysis that truly helps teams recognise the strengths they leverage as team members, and how they could optimise the performance of the team. Given the Team role composition, one can clearly see Overload or Surplus, Voids, and which would help determine where individual members could enable 'role sacrifice' to help their team most. Also, team members familiar with Belbin, can play a more effective role during various stages in the project lifecycle of an initiative.  Two much of one, at an early stage ( for example ME instead of PL) could restrict the flow of ideas, and not having CF at the final stage could lead to catastrophe at the end. 

Putting together an effective team continues to be a challenge in organisations, be it corporate or others. Qualifications, Experience are at best eligibility criteria’s. For suitability, the tendency of a member to behave in a particular way with others is key to understand.

For more details - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Role_Inventories

Used well, Belbin can help foster productive working relationships, support selection of highly effective teams, raise self-awareness, build trust and aid talent management.

Having accredited myself on Belbin, and having used this over 15 years, I strongly recommend the use to help support team understand how they could work more effectively.