Belbin Team Roles
How to make effective use of the people in your team
“The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say 'I'. And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say 'I'. They don't think 'I'. They think 'we'; they think 'team'. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but 'we' gets the credit.... This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”
— Peter Drucker
Management guru, writer and educator
There are some different models to explain how effective teams can work and how important different team roles are. One of these models is called Belbin Team Roles.
What they highlight is, just calling a group of people a “team” does not in practice transform them into a team. Many of us need to understand more about teams before we can contribute to them or lead them.
In our experience, the most effective leaders are those who invest time in understanding each role – not just the job itself but the way the job holder does the job – and understanding how teams develop.
Using the Belbin Team Roles inventory, Horizon’s Team Roles Workshop provides individual teams with practical approaches to understand different team roles, so leaders can make the most effective use of the people in their teams. It allows team members to understand each other’s preferred way of working and how these can contribute positively to achieving the goals of the team.
After more than 30 years in the business of delivering results through people, Horizon has clients who see lasting outcomes from this workshop, where their teams:
- have a common language they can use to communicate and collaborate more effectively and deliver better results
- are enabled to take on and assign work according to their strengths in order to set up every project for success – the teams play to their strengths and weaknesses
- are encouraged to think about who does what, and why, and are equipped to bring in new members who contribute to this balanced approach
- identify an agreed set of behaviours & ground rules for how the team should operate: “What is acceptable in this team and what’s not?”
- have team leaders equipped with tools and techniques to continuously build their teams, help people learn, grow and deliver enhanced results
- demonstrate that an effective balanced team really is "more than the sum of its parts: it is the product of their interaction" and delivers accordingly