Teams need the unique talents and experience of all their members. Every person performs some tasks quite naturally and effectively and will typically be less adequate at other tasks. True teamwork only occurs when team members complement each other’s strengths.

The Belbin Team Roles profiling identifies the strengths that individuals contribute to a team, and encourages each person to use and develop their natural behaviours, whilst managing their shortcomings or "allowable weaknesses". Acceptance of the allowable weaknesses frees up individuals to contribute their strong behaviours to the team. It is gaining the right balance of strengths and weaknesses that makes great teamwork possible.

The Belbin Team Roles profiling system identifies particular groups of team behaviours (with strengths and weaknesses in each) as nine "team roles". All nine roles are critical in a team if it is to operate effectively. Each team role is shaped by personality and learned behaviour.

Belbin’s work has shown that irrespective of the balance of functional skills in a group, if the group does not have the right balance of team roles then the functional resources can rarely be optimally applied.

Belbin Team Roles provide the means to:

Communicate accurately and decide what the team balance should be

Identify the activities where individuals will be most effective

Know the roles least suited to certain activities

Understand self and others to value diversity.

The method for identifying preferred team roles has two parts:

Self Perception Inventory – which is completed by each team member and consists of sentences that describe behaviour in the workplace

Observers Sheets – which are completed by work colleagues in the form of a checklist of adjectives describing behaviour characteristics.

The collection and processing of team member’s data (using self perception and observation by colleagues) provides the information to identify the natural team roles of members in a team. Individual and team profiles are developed and the consultant provides individual and team sessions to debrief the process and embed the learning with the team.

Contact: jill@cpdbiz.com.au who is an accredited Belbin Consultant.