Tips & Tricks: Get to know your team and their strengths, along with their preferred working styles.
Knowing a team mate’s niche in the workplace can help strengthen relationships and keep a strong team working like a well-oiled machine.
Can you teach your plant to fish?
Getting to know your team and their working styles can be time consuming, but is also very rewarding.
Once the foundations have been laid, it allows for open communication, and it also brings in the opportunity for working more effectively – and generally speaking, it brings more enjoyment to the job.
Those of you who enjoy what you do and who you work with are more likely to be leaping out of bed to get to work, whereas others may be pulling the sheets over your head and wishing you could join the dark side of your duvet.
Whilst there are many known and utilised ways of finding your team’s skill set, Belbin offers one of the more simple breakdowns with easy to identify group roles.
Learning as a team which skill sets you each hold and which category you each fit best, enables you to identify a more efficient way of working together. By doing this, you allow the opportunity for your team to feel empowered and work to their strengths – and to Improve on weaknesses. Gaining an understanding of how you each fit into your team can be motivational, allowing confidence to build and self improvements to be sought.
An effective team is one which is fit for purpose, and can function without the requirement of constant supervision.
You’re setting your team up for success, and allowing for more business opportunities in the process. As the saying goes, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
For more information about Belbin’s team roles consult the following link : http://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles/
We believe Belbin’s Nine Team Roles is a useful tool to identify the personal traits and its critical contribution to a high performing team when it composites of the team members whom their roles are complement to each other.