Chapter 20

Team roles (Belbin)

The big picture

Belbin (1985) distinguishes nine complementary roles of successful business teams that can be classified as follows:

1. The coordinator is a mature and confident person. He or she probably brings experience as a chairperson or leader of some kind to the table. Coordinators clarify goals, encourage decision-making and delegate tasks, but can, however, be manipulative or bossy, especially when they let others do work that could and should be done by themselves.
2. The team worker is cooperative, mild, perceptive and diplomatic – in a nutshell, everybody’s friend. Team workers listen, build, balance and avert friction. Their inherent indecisiveness surfaces in crunch situations. The doers in the team tend to think team workers talk too much.
3. The resource investigator is an enthusiastic, communicative extrovert who explores opportunities and develops contacts that he or she thinks will benefit him/her now or later. Although opportunistic and optimistic, resource investigators tend to have a short span of attention and they quickly lose interest.
4. The ‘plant’ is Belbin’s name for the creator or inventor. Plants are creative and imaginative, even brilliant at times. Their unorthodox thinking helps to solve difficult problems. Plants ignore incidentals and are too preoccupied to communicate effectively. The problem is that this self-aware genius has a tendency to get other team members’ backs up.
5. The monitor evaluates actions and ponders the strategy. Monitors are sober yet discerning, and keep track of progress. They oversee all options and judge accurately, but lack drive and the ability to inspire others.
6. The specialist is a single-minded, dedicated self-starter. Specialists provide rare knowledge and skills, and therefore their contribution is limited to a narrow front. These people get a kick out of technicalities and need to be told to get to the point.
7. The shaper is challenging, dynamic and thrives on pressure. Shapers have the drive and courage to overcome obstacles, see no evil and hear no evil. They might rub people up the wrong way in their zealous efforts get things going.
8. The implementer is a disciplined, reliable, conservative and efficient person who turns ideas into practical actions. Once at work, implementer will keep going and stick to the plan. They person might be a little rigid and unwilling to adopt alternative approaches or solutions along the way.
9. The finisher is meticulous, punctual, conscientious and anxious to make sure that everything turns out perfectly. Finishers deliver on time, but sometimes worry too much. They certainly hate to delegate work. Nobody else seems to understand that it has to be perfect.

When to use it

Analysis of (the roles of) team members using the Belbin model is especially useful in situations where a team must be created that can undertake an assignment requiring a certain set of skills and combination of roles, or in order to optimise cooperation in an existing team.

To make use of the model, members of a prospective team should first determine which roles they can and want to fulfil. Each member should subsequently be assessed to see whether, and to what extent, he or she could play one or more of the nine roles.

Such an assessment is in itself beneficial, in that it encourages individuals to take a closer look at their own strengths and weaknesses, at those of the other team members, and at their cooperation. These can then be exploited or corrected as necessary, resulting ultimately in a more flexible, complementary and stronger team.

How to use it

The assessment can be done in various ways:

• self-assessment (apply scores, rank, rate or distribute weights), possibly supervised by a third party;
• team assessment (let the team work on a small assignment or game, and let the members grade each other);
• assessment by an unprejudiced individual such as a mentor, a former team member, or perhaps a co-worker or supervisor.

With a profile of each team member’s ability to fulfil one or more roles, it is possible to detect the potential under- or over-representation of certain roles in the team (see Figure 20.1). If necessary, management may decide to use this information to pay greater attention to certain roles during the execution of team tasks and to make arrangements regarding the way in which the team members work together.

The final analysis

The way Belbin observes teams and the roles of team members assumes that there is an objective basis for assessing team members, but this is open to debate. A team assessment based on Belbin’s team roles is nonetheless a very useful exercise. People will recognise themselves and team dynamics in this model.

Whilst the different roles are complementary, it can be fatal to have too many representatives of the same type of role in one team: too many coordinators in the same team results in a clash, and having two monitors in the same team may hold up a team’s progress because they keep waiting for others to take action.

The model does not address the importance of interpersonal relationships within a team. Many teams that look good on paper fail to function properly in practice because they do not ‘click’. The reverse is also true: for example, a person who has no history of being a coordinator may rise to the occasion and fill a vacuum.

Reference

Belbin, R.M. (1985) Management Teams: Why they Succeed or Fail. London: Heinemann.