Identify Team Roles

Dr. Meredith Belbin identifies nine team roles that can help make up a balanced and effective team:

• The Plant. The plant is the highly creative and unconventional member of a team. They tend to be strong in thinking outside the box, but their primary weakness is a tendency to be forgetful.
• The Monitor-Evaluator (ME). This person is good at providing a logical and dispassionate view of the range of decisions before a team. They tend to have difficulties with being overly critical and slow-moving.
• The Coordinator (CO). This employee (it may be you) helps the team to focus on goals and to delegate work effectively. They might either over-delegate or under-delegate and end up micromanaging.
• The Resource Investigator (RI). This employee will tend to understand how your team’s work can best translate to the rest of the world. They will be good at understanding the competition and developing connections with others outside and inside the team framework, but they can have difficulties in following up on or getting in-depth information.
• The Implementer. This role involves someone who is good at taking theory and putting it into practice. They try to find strategies on how to make an idea work in the most efficient manner. Implementers have difficulty considering alternative approaches and may be slow to give up on a favored idea.
• Completer-Finishers. These team members excel at the end of a task. They make sure everything is functioning ideally. These employees act as a kind of quality control. Their strength -- having high standards -- can also be their weakness, in that they tend to be perfectionists.
• Team workers (TW). These employees are really good at smoothing over the tensions and difficulties that come up when people are working hard on creative endeavors. They excel at working and playing with others, but they can be indecisive when it comes time to make team decisions about the best course of action.
• Shapers. These employees act as a kind of engine for the team. They can effectively get others going and create momentum. Typically, shapers are highly-driven and enthusiastic individuals. Their weakness tends to be being overly aggressive and temperamental in their desire to get the team’s work done.
• The Specialist. The specialist of the group might only know how to do one thing, but they are an expert at it. Their focus is narrow and in-depth, which can be both their strength and their weakness.

An ideal team will be balanced with all nine roles being expressed. Since many teams are smaller than nine people, you may find that different team members excel at multiple roles. When you identify a key strength in one of your employees, for example, an employee who is highly energetic, then you can help them fulfill one or more roles on your team. The energetic employee for example might be good at being a shaper as well as being a resource investigator. Someone who is highly critical can be either a completer-finisher or a monitor-evaluator or both.

Until next time ...

 

Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP