TEAM ROLES

Team Roles at Work

Nobody is perfect, but a team can be

How do you build a perfect team out of imperfect people?

The perfect individual could be described as: Out-going Creative Diplomatic Organised Hard-driving Meticulous Motivating Objective Knowledgeable

Unlikely to find all of these qualities in one person...

Problems with Teams

Why fail/succeed? Problem often at personal level: how Why make the team members feel right/wrong about themselves decisions? and each other. Why not perform as People find it hard to well as expected, deal with these with tensions, behavioural, misunderstandings? emotional issues.

Address the problem

Need a way of looking at these issues, measuring their effect, and need a language for talking about them What makes a balanced and effective team - better the mix, the better the performance

People at work have a

Functional Role
job title & function experience & expertise not personal characteristics or aptitudes

Team Role

&

that persons tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way

Team Role
An effective way to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of a team. Helps the team to understand ways in which it could improve performance.

Description
Developed by Meredith Belbin in 1981, following nine years of study and has become one of the most accessible and widely used tools to support team building. The team roles were designed to define and predict potential success of management teams, recognizing that the strongest teams have a diversity of characters and personality types. Has been criticized due to it's potential oversimplification and 'pigeon-holing' of individuals. However, when used wisely to gain insight about the working of the team and identify the team strengths and weaknesses it can be extremely useful.

Belbin Team Role Expert System

Belbin - 9 team role types Each type has a typical behavioural strength and a characteristic weakness Allowable weaknesses are the negative side of the positive strength

 Belbin describes a team role as "a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way." There are Three action oriented roles Shaper, Implementer and Completer Finisher;

Three people oriented roles Co-ordinator, Teamworker and Resource Investigator Three cerebral roles Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist.

The 9 team roles are summarized in the table below

Plant
Plants are creative, unorthodox and a generator of ideas. If an innovative solution to a problem is needed, a Plant is a good person to ask. A good plant will be bright and free-thinking. Plants can tend to ignore incidentals and refrain from getting bogged down in detail. The Plant bears a strong resemblance to the popular caricature of the absentminded professor-inventor, and often has a hard time communicating ideas to others.

Resource Investigator
The Resource Investigator gives a team a rush of enthusiasm at the start of the project by vigorously pursuing contacts and opportunities. He or she is focused outside the team, and has a finger firmly on the pulse of the outside world. Where a Plant creates new ideas, a Resource Investigator will quite happily steal them from other companies or people. A good Resource Investigator is a maker of possibilities and an excellent networker, but has a tendency to lose momentum towards the end of a project and to forget small details.

Coordinator
A Coordinator often becomes the default chairperson of a team, stepping back to see the big picture. Coordinators are confident, stable and mature and because they recognise abilities in others, they are very good at delegating tasks to the right person for the job. The Coordinator clarifies decisions, helping everyone else focus on their tasks. Coordinators are sometimes perceived to be manipulative, and will tend to delegate all work, leaving nothing but the delegating for them to do.

Shaper
The shaper is a task-focused leader who abounds in nervous energy, who has a high motivation to achieve and for whom winning is the name of the game. The shaper is committed to achieving ends and will shape others into achieving the aims of the team. He or she will challenge, argue or disagree and will display aggression in the pursuit of goal achievement. Two or three shapers in a group, according to Belbin, can lead to conflict, aggravation and infighting.

Monitor Evaluator
Monitor Evaluators are fair and logical observers and judges of what is going on. Because they are good at detaching themselves from bias, they are often the ones to see all available options with the greatest clarity. They take everything into account, and by moving slowly and analytically, will almost always come to the right decision. However, they can become excessively cynical, damping enthusiasm for anything without logical grounds, and they have a hard time inspiring themselves or others to be passionate about their work.

Teamworker
A Teamworker is the greasy oil between the cogs that keeps the machine that is the team running. They are good listeners and diplomats, talented at smoothing over conflicts and helping parties understand each other without becoming confrontational. The beneficial effect of a Teamworker is often not noticed until they are absent, when the team begins to argue, and small but important things cease to happen. Because of an unwillingness to take sides, a Teamworker may not be able to take decisive action when it is needed.

Implementer
The Implementer takes what the other roles have suggested or asked, and turns their ideas into positive action. They are efficient and selfdisciplined, and can always be relied on to deliver on time. They are motivated by their loyalty to the team or company, which means that they will often take on jobs everyone else avoids or dislikes. However, they may be seen as closed-minded and inflexible since they will often have difficulty deviating from their own well-thought-out plans.

Completer Finisher
The Completer Finisher is a perfectionist and will often go the extra mile to make sure everything is "just right," and the things he or she delivers can be trusted to have been double-checked and then checked again. The Completer Finisher has a strong inward sense of the need for accuracy, rarely needing any encouragement from others because that individual's own high standards are what he or she tries to live up to. They may frustrate their teammates by worrying excessively about minor details and refusing to delegate tasks that they do not trust anyone else to perform.

Specialist
Specialists are passionate about learning in their own particular field. As a result, they will have the greatest depth of knowledge, and enjoy imparting it to others. They are constantly improving their wisdom. If there is anything they do not know the answer to, they will happily go and find it. Specialists bring a high level of concentration, ability, and skill in their discipline to the team, but can only contribute on that narrow front and will tend to be uninterested in anything which lies outside its narrow confines.

Use of the team roles

An ideal team should ideally have a healthy balance of all 9 team roles. Strong teams normally have a strong co-ordinator, a plant, a monitor evaluator and one or more implementers, team workers, resource investigators or completer finishers. A shaper should be an alternative to a co-ordinator rather than having both. In practice, the ideal is rarely the case, and it can be beneficial for a team to know which of the team roles are either over represented or absent and to understand individual's secondary roles. Team roles tend to develop and mature and may change with experience and conscious attention. If a role is absent from the team, then it is often filled by someone who has not recognised this role as a dominant one. The team should share their team roles to increase understanding and enable mutual expectations to be met.

Balanced Teams
Teams work best when there is a balance of primary roles and when team members know their roles, work to their strengths and actively manage weaknesses. To achieve the best balance, there should be: One Co-ordinator or Shaper (not both) for leader A Plant to stimulate ideas A Monitor/evaluator to maintain honesty and clarity One or more Implementer, Team worker, Resource investigator or Completer/finisher to make things happen

Functional Roles and Role Clusters The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) Team Model organizes the activities of IT operations into seven distinct role clusters that represent areas, or functional roles, within IT operations where particular staff members or groups are performing activities toward a shared goal or a similar mission of service.

 These role clusters do not imply or suggest any kind of an organization chart or a set of job titles because this will vary widely by organization and team. Organizations will implement aspects differently, depending on the size of the group, the scope and boundaries of the systems, the geographic locations, the resources available to the team, and the specialties and experiences of the individual staff. For example, operations management groups within corporate enterprises, small businesses, educational institutions, e-businesses, and hosting and application service providers-while all requiring a common baseline of operational functions-will each also have distinct operational needs for their specific businesses.

The following figure provides some examples of these key functional roles or function teams and how they align with the MOF Team Role Clusters. The functions listed are just a few of the many functional roles or function teams that may exist in service management organizations.

 The number of people required to perform each role will vary widely. In smaller operations-management organizations, one person often performs multiple roles. In larger organizations, however, entire function teams may be allocated to perform a single, specific functional or procedural role. As companies evolve into virtual enterprises and geographically disparate teams dependent on numerous partners for daily operational support, the functional roles in the operations teams will include dedicated process owners, such as availability management and change management. This is also a way to weave in the dedicated process ownership concepts described in ITIL while combining them with tactical and technology-specific function teams. The process and functional combinations result in virtual process teams-in other words, cooperating groups of people from internal and external resource pools that get the work done collectively.

Team Complexes
A Team Complex is a team dynamic, a hidden force that operates within a team. Whilst some team dynamics can help team performance, a team complex is a potential dysfunction. It can prevent a team from adapting, from responding appropriately to certain situations.

Relevant in certain situations

The presence of a team complex doesn't necessarily result in poor team performance, it depends on what the team needs to do to succeed. If a team need to use a particular collective behaviour to succeed, and a team complex prevents them from using that behaviour or makes them use it inappropriately, then poor performance will likely result. The team complex acts in a similar way to a physical handicap for an athlete, it limits and inhibits performance. However, if that behaviour is never a critical factor in team success, then the presence of the team complex may be irrelevant. In this case, the team complex acts more like an appendix - it may be present but it doesn't cause any problems. A team complex is therefore relevant in certain types of situations, but not all.

GroupThink
A team complex could be considered as a form of GroupThink. Most definitions of GroupThink say that it is a team dysfunction where individuals strive to conform to the prevailing thought processes or decisions within the group, at the expense of feelings of individual responsibility or personal views. In fact, conforming to group decisions is a team dynamic that can make a positive contribution to team functioning. Good teamwork involves getting the right balance, or managing the tension between, collective and individual opinions. This natural process becomes dysfunctional when the balance shifts so much towards group conformance that individual views/contributions are repressed.

The Sixteen Teamwork Complexes:

The Sixteen Teamwork Complexes, below, are derived from the rigid overuse or underuse of team roles, which in turn are derived from Carl Jung's theory of psychological types.

Rigid underuse occurs when a particular team role becomes a "no go area". The team may be able to use many roles in the team, but this is one that they avoid even when it is appropriate to use it because of the situation they are in.
Rigid overuse occurs when a particular team role is used far too often, even in situations when it is inappropriate. Some team complexes can involve both rigid overuse and rigid underuse. The team role becomes like a broken volume control on a radio, where it is either on or off: as the volume control is turned, the sound cuts in and out, going from very loud to very quiet, but never in between. That is, the team role is either overused or avoided, and the team are unable to use it at an appropriate 'volume' in-between.

Rigid Underuse

Team Role (Jungian functionattitude)

Rigid Overuse

Independence Eggshells The team works independently, Team members daren't disagree Coach not as a team (extraverted Feeling) with each other Plethora Crusader They try to do everything, not They are too wrapped up in their Campaigner focusing on what's important (introverted Feeling) own cause Rut They are stuck in a rut, only doing what they've always done Initiatives They start too many initiatives without following through

Explorer (extraverted iNtuition)

Blinkered They can't see outside their own box

Innovator (introverted iNtuition)

Pluto They are on a different planet to everyone else

Maana They spend too much time thinking everything will be done tomorrow

Sculptor (extraverted Sensing)

100mph They go at everything without stopping to think

Vague They fail to recognise they haven't communicated with each other

Curator (introverted Sensing)

Bureaucracy They try to collect and keep too much information

Chaos Chaos results from an absence of proper organisation

Conductor (extraverted Thinking)

Stickler The rules are too important and the team is inflexible

Fallacy They are unaware of consequences because they don't think things through logically

Scientist (introverted Thinking)

Apollo They spend all their time nitpicking each others' arguments

Managing Role Stretch

How to manage role stretch in order to get the optimum balance of both performance and personal development/fulfilment The key areas to address is the degree of stretch between the manager's personality, preferences and skills, and their work role and how they approach it. The aim of such actions is to change the external stretch so that job pressures and personal development are aligned.

 There are broadly two schools of thought on how to increase performance in Manager Coaching. Playing to natural strengths leads to peak performance. Greater adaptability enables the manager to take whichever approach is appropriate for the situation.

 Both of these can be true and they represent an important tension that needs to be managed effectively. The main aims are therefore to: raise awareness of the differing needs of the individual and the job identify the degree of stretch currently being experienced between the two set goals for the degree of stretch that the individual needs to achieve establish an action plan to achieve that new degree of stretch - ie to be stretched more or to be stretched less

The table below provides a useful framework.

Small stretch (role is close to personal preferences) Big stretch (role is very different from personal preferences)

Good stretch (experienced as good by the individual)

Fulfillment, contentment, sense of Meeting challenges, striving to enjoyment, feeling of "I'm in the improve, a feeling of "this is right job", wanting to doing me good", sense of contribute, enthusiasm, personal development, personal needs met, increasing comfort with nonwillingness to adapt preferred roles, other forums (temporarily) to others' differing where personal needs met. styles.
Stress, demotivation, difficulty coping, a feeling of "I can't go on with this", looking for other jobs, opting out, depression, 'no light at the end of the tunnel'.

Bad stretch Boredom, stagnation, character (experienced 'ossification', lack of challenge, as bad by the feeling of "I've done it all individual) before", lack of flexibility, unwillingness to accommodate others' styles.

 The manager should place themselves in the table according to where they are now, and then according to where they want to be. It is often difficult for managers to choose to behave in different ways, because they are under pressure to deliver organizational goals. In such circumstances, rather than swim against the tide, they should change the nature of external pressure/demands being placed on them.

This usually does not involve changing existing organisational goals, but rather changing their work environment - for example, by: changing the reporting structure recruiting new team members redistributing responsibilities: delegating work or taking on new tasks setting behavioural goals/targets and publishing them introducing a new steering/stakeholder committee with a specific brief, to scrutinise the deliverables from the manager's department in a particular way appointing a deputy introducing new processes, eg: running meetings in a different way etc.

The Apollo Syndrome

'The Apollo Syndrome', a phenomenon discovered by Dr Meredith Belbin where teams of highly capable individuals can, collectively, perform badly. he reported some unexpectedly poor results with teams formed of people who had sharp, analytical minds and high mental ability -

 'The Apollo Syndrome', a phenomenon discovered by Dr Meredith Belbin where teams of highly capable individuals can, collectively, perform badly. Dr Meredith Belbin is one of the original 'gurus' of Team Building. In his first book on Management Teams (Belbin, 1981) he reported some unexpectedly poor results with teams formed of people who had sharp, analytical minds and high mental ability -

This failure seemed to be due to certain flaws in the way the team operated: They spent excessive time in abortive or destructive debate, trying to persuade other team members to adopt their own view, and demonstrating a flair for spotting weaknesses in others' arguments. This led to the discussion equivalent of 'the deadly embrace'. They had difficulties in their decision making, with little coherence in the decisions reached (several pressing and necessary jobs were often omitted). Team members tended to act along their own favourite lines without taking account of what fellow members were doing, and the team proved difficult to manage. In some instances, teams recognised what was happening but over compensated - they avoided confrontation, which equally led to problems in decision making.

How Apollo teams succeed

There were successful Apollo teams, however, that were characterised by the absence of highly dominant individuals, and a particular style of leadership. Successful leaders were suspicious and sceptical people who sought to impose some shape or pattern on group discussion, and on the outcome of group activities. They focused attention on the setting of objectives and priorities, and shaping the way team effort was applied. Rather than 'drawing out' team members, the successful leaders were tough, discriminating people who could both hold their ground in any company, yet not dominate the group. A key lesson from Belbin's work is that putting together a team of the cleverest individuals does not necessarily produce the best results, and the team needs to be designed ensuring that there is a blend of team roles.

Thank You