Learn Belbin Team Roles through Reflection

1. Introduction

I am quite impressed with Belbin excellence work on classifying the team role. Team role is defined by Belbin as “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way”. The part that I like the most is that I could easily relate to the grouping of team roles to project elements which are people, planning and task focus.

As the team leader/project manager/domain expert, I found myself carrying on different team roles which depends on specific activity or situation, in relation to project’s or team’ need.

Following is my reflection on the team roles that I used to play in three most frequent work activities related.

2. A reflection on troubleshooting an end user feedback

My role is a Sharper and Coordinator.

From my experience, in any technical team, most of members have technical background and they have tendency to dive into solution instead of trying to clarifying what the problem is exactly.

In this scenario, I am usually organizing the discussion between relevant users and my team in order to coordinate on clarifying the problem, including specific replication steps, and reaffirming the understanding on expected outcome. Then I drive and encourage the team to come up with their own solution to overcome the issues and ensure necessary quality control approach to be plant in.

As the result, the team could deliver the satisfied solution to user in a timely manner, most of the time.

3. A reflection on project planning

I usually play the role of a Coordinator and a Monitor/Evaluator.

It’s my job to ensure the team understand the project’s objective and ensure the objectives has been met.

During the team planning, I encourage all team member to speak up their opinion and ask questions if there is any clarification needed. And then I coordinate and ask further question to align the team back to the project objectives. It’s like zooming in and zooming out process so that the team could visualize bigger picture as well as details action list. In this situation, I play the role of Coordinator.

Occasionally, when the team generate so much options, I have to step in to evaluate, assess and give suggest for the team so that they could choose the most agreeable action items. In this situation, I play the role of Monitor/Evaluator.

As the result, the team could develop good project plan and commit to deliver them with quality and met the schedule

4. A refection on handling a specialist project

In this case, I play the role as Plant and Specialist on handling special proof of concept project such as building new data model to support decision making for healthcare specialist.

I often self-start and dedicate to spend time to do research on my own before gathering other team member on a discussion. In addition, I also need to perform some simulation to ensure that the new model meets the expected criteria such as compliance with our existing and less than 5% of error rate, in term of drug interaction and allergy matching algorithm. Occasionally, I have to creatively think of new solution instead of reuse any existing solution in the past. That requires some quiet time with a blank paper and a cup of coffee.

Moreover, it is my passion on healthcare domain and its practical usage of healthcare data in improving its quality and accuracy, in term of prescription and effective treatment that always drive me to justify the model against the world-view references or other international standard. That requires in depth knowledge of healthcare domain.

5. Conclusion

I 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.  For myself, after reflecting through the different work situations and what role I played, I gain a better understanding on my preference team roles. In this case, I am more a Coordinator, Sharper, Plant, Specialist and Monitor/Evaluator.