In this clip, the interviewer (Nigel Belbin, Meredith’s son) asks questions, such as:

For more Belbin and Team Role videos, check out our video posts, including the video What Are Team Roles?.

The company executives asked 3Circle Partners to help them launch a major “Reimagination” project. They had identified 30 key issues the company needed to address, and called on 3CP’s Team Role analysis to help them create a team around each issue with the right balance of team roles to favor innovation. The teams also participated in Team Accelerator™ workshops to give them the basic skills for working most effectively together, based on their strengths and weaknesses.

This new team-based structure was used to implement a number of major innovations in the newspaper, including a revamping of the physical layout of the editorial/on-line offices to foster more effective collaboration.

Overall, the company reports good results from almost all teams, and outstanding results from several of them. They also discovered several true leaders in the organization (those who could harness the full power of their teams). The Globe and Mail is now viewed as one of the most successful newspapers in North America.

About that time, the key VP went through Team Accelerator™ workshop, and realized the 3Circle Partner approach would help break the log jam. All members of two key teams also went through Team Accelerator workshops and learned collaboration skills. One key insight was that both teams were imbalanced in their Team Roles, both having an overabundance of some roles and gaps in other roles (they were imbalanced in different ways). Because of these imbalances, neither team could be very productive on its own, and the differences in working styles practically guaranteed conflict between the groups.

Yet the two groups realized that if they combined their strengths, together they could create a well-balanced team. The groups worked through their differences, developed a better understanding of the each other’s dynamics, and develop ground rules that would help them communicate in ways that would avoid future problems.

Xerox credits this work with speeding up the release-to-market of their new ColorQube printer. The improved collaboration also resulted in significantly fewer post-launch problems compared to other product launches.

He attended a public workshop given by 3Circle Partners, which inspired him to have Belbin Team Role analyses done for all staff. He also arranged to have them all participate in a Team Accelerator™ workshop as a team. That session focused on understanding gaps and overlaps in roles.

The turning point came when the CEO realized he had been trying to perform the tasks associated with the kind of Coordinator tasks that are required of someone who needs to keep everyone on a team moving forward. Unfortunately, he had no natural interest in that kind of work. What energized him more was making contacts and coming up with new ideas (jobs linked to the Resource Investigator and Shaper roles, respectively).

The CEO was at a critical juncture: if he were to play to his strengths, he could not do a good job of being a CEO. So he “fired” himself, and step aside to become a Managing Partner, where the tasks required of him played directly into his Resource Investigator and Shaper talents.

The changes didn’t stop there, however. The now-former CEO convinced his corporate management to allow him to create a new COO position, and deliberately filled that job with a person who had the Coordinator skills he lacked. The company also formed 3-person “balanced” teams (in terms of Belbin team roles), each which was assigned accounts.

Three years after these actions, the revenues for this division had nearly doubled, and it had gone from the worst-performing regional division in the company to the best.

When learning about the nine team roles, Sam could see that he spent much of his time doing the kinds of tasks associated with the Shaper role: people who make things happen no matter the obstacles, who thrive with challenge and pressure.

But the profile report he received showed that both he and others around him saw even stronger talents, those embodied in the role of Resource Investigator: an extroverted person who naturally keeps and maintains a lot of contacts, and uses those contacts to find resources the team needs.

A small portion of the Team Role report is shown in the figure. The numbers reflect how highly both Sam (“Self”) and a number of “observers” (coworkers) felt about his ability to perform the jobs associated with various roles. It surprised Sam that even he rated himself higher in the RI (resource investigator) skills; but what struck him most was just how much higher the observers rated him in that category.

For Sam, this mismatch between the type of work he spent his time doing (Shaper) and the type of work he was even better at (Resource Investigator) had held him back in his career. By focusing more on performing the Resource Investigator role, Sam became even more effective in his job. And within three years his career success allowed him to become a partner in a Big 3 consulting firm.

As you can imagine, this is a lengthy process, as every change needs to be ‘normed’, and the nuances of the English language can prove tricky!

We are now at a point where we have a new Self-Perception Inventory (SPI). This is where you come in: we need enough responses to ensure that we have made the right changes, and that we have a large enough database from which to take a norm from. We need to obtain about 5000 responses.

If you would like to take part in our research and have a spare 15 minutes, please click here. We would like you to complete the SPI and collect 4 observers. We can’t offer you a full Belbin report in return, but we can send you our latest ‘Manager’s report’ which we are hoping will prove to be a valuable new Belbin report.

This manager’s report is under development, and it is currently produced using a very small norm base, so please bear this in mind when digesting the results. Having said this we hope you will find it useful and, of course, any feedback will be appreciated!

We do need people from a cross-section of organizations and jobs, so please forward this page on to anyone who you think would be intrigued and willing to help.

Marsha is manager of Organization Development at ALLDATA and has consulted with 3Circle Partners. She has more than 25 years of experience aligning human capital with business needs for profitability, serving as a Human Resources Director, an organization development specialist, and HR generalist in diverse industries such as technology, consumer products, industrial manufacturing, and customer relations and support. She has been a key business partner, change agent, and facilitator in environments undergoing start-up, rapid-growth, domestic/international market expansion, mergers and acquisition), as well as turnaround, financial restructuring, and operational consolidation/downsizing.

Belbin Case Study: Leadership Development
by Marsha Egbert, Manager of Organizational Development, ALLDATA

Pete had a meteoric career in realty, quickly rising to the top and staying there for a number of years. Another company recognized his success by offering him the chance to manage real estate sales in one of its regional divisions. Pete jumped at the chance for career advancement. He approached his new job with enthusiasm, eager to prove himself an able leader.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go well at first. After a few months, his division had fallen to having the worst sales performance of any in the company. Because Pete’s total compensation was heavily tied to the division’s sales performance, he was now making less than half of his income at his previous employer.

After going through Belbin Team Role training, Pete realized that he had been equating “leadership” with the Coordinator role — which was one of his weakest areas. He had far too short an attention span, did not really enjoy detailed follow-up, and tended to dominate meetings. That was why his team was constantly behind and people felt they weren’t given a chance to contribute.

One of Pete’s first moves after studying his Belbin profile was to hire a strong Coordinator as his second-in-command. With that person in place, Pete focused more on what he did well: connecting with resources and opportunistically pursuing new leads (behaviors typical of the Resource Investigator role). In a remarkably short time-frame, his team made a complete turnaround, becoming the most successful division in the company (and ultimately doubling profits within six years).

Commentary:
We all know that a group’s performance is usually closely linked to the effectiveness of its leader.
Chances are pretty good that if teams or even entire departments or functional areas in your company are under-performing, there will be mismatch between the needed leadership skills and the leader’s actual team role strengths. In some cases, it may be necessary to replace the leader. But as this case study illustrates, that is not always needed. Rather, knowing a leader’s team role strengths and weaknesses allows you to develop a plan for compensating for the weaknesses – and the entire work area can benefit.

This post is an excerpt from a white paper, New Directions for Human Resources: A two-part series presenting new ideas for meeting the HR challenges of today.

Part 1: Team Role Theory: A discipline to help HR become the solutions provider that organizations are demanding.

Part 2: The Power of Self-Discovery: How to create high performance individuals, work teams, and organizations through experiential learning.

You can download the full white paper here.

Applying Belbin Team Role Theory to managing work assignments
by Andy Piotrowski, Senior Consultant, 3Circle Partners

A question frequently posed by people who are exposed to Belbin Team Role Theory is “How can we apply these concepts to our day-to-day work?”

This question really gets to the heart of Dr. Meredith Belbin’s contribution to play to our strengths and manage our weaknesses – both individually and collectively.

With many of our clients engaged in project-driven Continuous Improvements programs, below are some examples of how we can use Team Role concepts in making decisions on work assignments.

1) Key Stages of a Project:
In chapter 9 of his book “Team Roles at Work”, Dr. Belbin outlines his thoughts on how different team roles may be required at different stages of a multi-stage project. He identifies 6 critical stages, each of which has to be successfully accomplished if a heavy investment of resources is to yield a proper financial return.

2) Assigning Action items:
Once you have defined what work needs to be done and how best to do the work, the remaining question is “who does the work?”

For example, if the task is to approach customers to gather information on their expectations or experiences, the outgoing, enthusiastic Resource Investigator (RI) is a good choice. There may also be more complex situations where we may wish to assign more than one individual to an action item where a variety of skills could be required.

E.g. When selecting the best person to:
Create a detailed project plan or flow chart — assign an Implementer (IMP).
Proofread the plan or chart — Use a Completer Finisher (CF) .

3) Instructor Assignments:
It is a common practice within Continuous Improvement programs to deliver technical training, typically with two or more instructors. When choosing pairs or teams of instructors, it is prudent to select two individuals with complementary Belbin skills. It is helpful if the instructors do a Belbin Team Map and establish groundrules for how they will work together.

4) Coaching assignments:
An individual may benefit by being assigned a coach with complementary Belbin skills. For example a very detailed Specialist/Completer Finisher (SP+CF) may value the broader perspective of a Co-ordinator/Monitor Evaluator (CO+ME) coach.

I’d be very interested to hear other thoughts on this topic in the comments section below. How do you use Belbin in your organization to assign work?

In my next post, I will explore other aspects of managing work assignments.

The answer is “Yes, and no.”

The Belbin Team Role Report measures behavior, not personality. Behavior can change over time, in response to a number of factors, including personality, the work environment, experience, and one’s current values and motivations.

Every job and team has its own set of requirements. As these requirements change over time (or even in a new job), behaviors will need to adjust to match the work situation.

One’s behavior can also change based upon role learning: through an awareness and cultivation of one’s strengths and weaknesses, and how they are clustered as Belbin Team Roles, one can develop and play to his or her preferred roles. A Belbin Team Role Report generated at a later date would usually show a more coherent report, with a stronger display of those preferred roles the individual is working to develop.

If you would like to get a new Belbin Team Role Report to see how your Team Roles have changed, you can always contact us or order online.

Nicola is one of our instructors, and has fifteen years of international experience in the fields of leadership, teamwork, conflict resolution, coaching and organizational development both within multinational companies and international organizations.

Click here to read Nicola’s other blog posts.

Integrating Self-perception and Feedback: The First Step to Self-Awareness
by Nicola Naddi, Business Leader – Europe, 3Circle Partners

How can we find our real self? The question may sound too philosophical and not practical enough for a manager or more generally for anyone who works in a business organization.

Maybe, we should ask a more practical and less philosophical question: how can we collect accurate information on ourselves? And why should we need to receive accurate information on ourselves? The answer is quite simple: because if we are not aware of how we behave and contribute in a working environment, there is a high likelihood that we are not efficient. Therefore, self-awareness is the first step to better self-management, which in turn can create a better climate for the journey of self-mastery.

When we want to buy a new car, we gather information from magazines, advertisements, dealers, friends, etc. When looking to gain self-awareness, we need to apply more or less the same process: we need to collect reliable information from various sources.

One important source is represented by our perceptions of ourselves. But if we think back to our new car analogy, you would be unlikely to base your decision to buy a new car on only one source of information. This is especially true if that source of information is biased (such as a car dealer!). The same apply to our self-perception: we cannot use our judgment and evaluation of ourselves to find out who really are because, as much as a car dealer, we tend to be subjective. Therefore, to find our real self we need to receive inputs from others.

Observer inputs as well as self-perception needs to be put together systematically, sifted and normalized to provide a working profile of an individual. The intricate nature of this task may be optimally facilitated with computer assistance. This is the reason why Dr. Meredith Belbin and his team have created the e-Interplace® system, which creates Belbin Team Role Reports. It is composed of a Self-Perception Inventory (SPI) and Observer Assessments (OA) to measure behavioral characteristics that we display when working in teams.

It is important to remember that the Belbin Team Role Reports measures behavior rather than personality (unlike psychometric tests). While it could be argued that only the individual knows his/her own personality, behavior is observable and can be interpreted and used to predict future reactions and conduct.

Since behavior is observable, it is relatively simple to receive feedback from others on how we behave. We just need to ask for it. This is why the Belbin Team Role Reports is built in such a way that we can ask our boss, colleagues and collaborators (a minimum of four people) for feedback in an anonymous and systematic fashion to substantiate or refute our own claims expressed in the SPI.

As we have pointed out before, this is extremely important because our answers in the SPI cannot be fully trusted because we may tend to be subjective. Furthermore, we must also consider that we may have limited self-insight or we may answer in the SPI (as in many other psychometric tests that rely entirely on self-reporting) regarding how we wish to behave or be perceived rather than how we really are.

Finally, we can add that responses from self-perception are isolated rather than “democratic” and since only one point of view is given, there are limited or even no opportunities for learning and personal development.

In conclusion, to stress the importance and need for integrating self-perception with feedback from others in order to become more self-aware and efficient, I’d like to use another analogy: If one person tells you you’re drunk, you might be ok to drive home, but if four people tell you that you’re drunk, you should hand over the car keys. After all, they are telling you something based your observable behavior.

If different sources of information are giving us the same input, we should seriously consider integrating our self-perception with feedback from others. If we did so, it would mean that we are taking the first step on the personal development path to self-awareness.