08/06/2023
How can you increase a team's potential with role typologies?
Any work with colleagues is a team effort. This means that every team member has a place and a role in the team, even if they are not interested in the outcome and stay away from the work.
Today we're going to talk about how to lead a team to high results through role assignment.
It has been found that a team's lack of conflict or "star" makeup prevents it from solving problems. Conversely, a variety of roles helps the team cope more effectively with stress and achieve results.
Belbin described nine key team roles:
π The Social roles: Resource Investigator, Teamworker and Co-ordinator;
π The Thinking roles: Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist;
π The Action or Task roles: Shaper, Implementer and Completer Finisher.
By role, he meant "the tendency to work and collaborate with others in a certain way".
If teams are formed with a role typology in mind, and each participant is aware of the role they and their colleagues play, this greatly increases the chances of success.
The first step toward an informed role assignment is diagnostics.
There are several tools on the market to analyze team roles. We use questionnaires from the British company Saville Assessment. The participant fills them out online, and the system automatically generates a team role report.
The questionnaire is based on the Saville Assessment team role model. For convenience, all model roles are divided into four competency clusters of the Wave model.
The personal report describes the employee's roles, while the team report gives a complete picture of the roles represented.
For example, the Implementer monitors the quality of the end result: reminds the team of deadlines, checks the strength of ideas and suggestions, directs the team to complete the main task, and evaluates the quality of the intermediate and final results.
If the team does not have an Implementer, there is a high risk that the team will not achieve its goal. It will be stuck in the development phase, all attention will be focused on the generation of ideas, methodology or communication within the team, but the work process itself will be difficult or not completed.
It is not only the allocation of roles that matters, but also the ability to manifest a role. The role report also shows how much of each role's potential is expressed.
How will a role typology help your team?
The most obvious advice is to form teams with a balance and diversity of roles.
For teams and companies already in operation, we recommend to change the structure of the team to reflect the desired roles, including relying on the potential to manifest the role.
To make this rearrangement efficient and painless, the steps you can read about in the next article will help you.