NOTE: This blog post was drafted over a year ago but wasn’t published. I’m currently reviewing my working preferences to help my colleagues and I understand each other better and thought I’d take the opportunity to share one of the tools we’ll be looking at and show how mine has changed since I started my current job (I don’t think my scores on Belbin’s team roles will have changed much over the last year).
On the first day of my current job, I completed a Belbin team roles survey. It was a really useful tool and something which taught both myself and my manager about the way I worked. I blogged about my results – I came out as an implementer, gatherer and completer finisher. This seemed to fit well with my preferences in a team situation, and pleased my manager as he’s not by nature a completer finisher and we’re only a small team so it’s useful to have someone happy to take on that role.
Fast forward about 3.5 years, and I find myself doing the Belbin team roles survey again, this time as part of an internal ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management) course. So have my results changed?
On the whole, my results are fairly consistent. I still have relatively high scores for implementing, gathering, and for completer finisher. My main preference (IM – implementer) is summarised as:
Implementers are the people who get things done. They turn the team’s ideas and concepts into practical actions and plans. They are typically conservative, disciplined people who work systematically and efficiently and are very well organized. These are the people who you can count on to get the job done.
This is often the role I take on given the opportunity to utilise my natural preferences – it’s consistent with some of the other tools I’ve been doing too. In my current organisation, I’m the person who plans projects and reviews progress – I keep things running to time (when I can!) and am aware of what we have coming up and try to ensure we have things in place to accommodate that. In many projects I’m involved in, even when I’m not the project manager, I’m often the person who prompts others (possibly to their annoyance I appreciate!) when things are in risk of running behind schedule or reminds them we have things coming up and need to plan for them and prepare things in advance.
It was no big surprise to me that implementer came out as the top score again. Many of my other scores are quite similar too. However there’s one quite interesting change in my scores – two roles seems to have swapped importance. My team worker role (TW) has decreased, and my shaper role (SH) has increased. Here’s what Belbin has to say about these roles:
Team Workers are the people who provide support and make sure that people within the team are working together effectively. These people fill the role of negotiators within the team and they are flexible, diplomatic, and perceptive. These tend to be popular people who are very capable in their own right, but who prioritize team cohesion and helping people getting along.
Shapers are people who challenge the team to improve. They are dynamic and usually extroverted people who enjoy stimulating others, questioning norms, and finding the best approaches for solving problems. The Shaper is the one who shakes things up to make sure that all possibilities are considered and that the team does not become complacent.
What does this mean in practice?
According to the course facilitator, it is quite common for this change to happen over time. At the beginning of our careers, we’re keen to work well with everyone we meet, but over time we shift to just wanting to get things done. The desire to focus on tasks is definitely true in my case, and I think the fact that I work fairly independently on most projects (as part of a team, but often with a specific area of responsibility) has impacted this reduction in my team player score. I was a little surprised to find that Shaper now scores fairly highly for me, but aside from the extroverted part (I’m an introvert) I can see that I do often take on that role, certainly questioning norms and challenging for improvement.
I found it really interesting to revisit Belbin, and am so glad I blogged my initial results so that I could easily compare them during the workshop. If you’re interested in learning more about the type of role you tend to play on a team, and the roles which should ideally be fulfilled for a successful team, I’d recommend checking out Belbin – the Mind Tools guide is a useful overview.
Have you looked at your Belbin team role preferences? What did you find? Do you think any of these have changed over time?
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