Two years after a new CEO took over at the regional office of a national realty company, things were not looking good. The CEO had brought a number of new clients with him, but still profit had dropped and the company was stagnating. The work environment was so poor that high-performing brokers were leaving en masse. The CEO was dissatisfied with his own performance, but felt he had tried everything to get his staff to shape up.
He attended a public workshop given by Belbin North America, which inspired him to have Belbin Team Role analyses done for all staff. He also arranged to have them all participate in a Team Accelerator™ workshop as a team. That session focused on understanding gaps and overlaps in roles.
The turning point came when the CEO realized he had been trying to perform the tasks associated with the kind of Coordinator tasks that are required of someone who needs to keep everyone on a team moving forward. Unfortunately, he had no natural interest in that kind of work. What energized him more was making contacts and coming up with new ideas (jobs linked to the Resource Investigator and Shaper roles, respectively).
The CEO was at a critical juncture: if he were to play to his strengths, he could not do a good job of being a CEO. So he “fired” himself, and step aside to become a Managing Partner, where the tasks required of him played directly into his Resource Investigator and Shaper talents.
The changes didn’t stop there, however. The now-former CEO convinced his corporate management to allow him to create a new COO position, and deliberately filled that job with a person who had the Coordinator skills he lacked. The company also formed 3-person “balanced” teams (in terms of Belbin team roles), each which was assigned accounts.
Three years after these actions, the revenues for this division had nearly doubled, and it had gone from the worst-performing regional division in the company to the best.
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