Change Is Good: Increasing your Effectiveness by Adapting Your Belbin Team Roles
One of the questions we often hear is: “If I did my Belbin Team Roles Report over again, would it be different?”
Most individuals have more than one team role in which they can perform effectively, and therefore are able to contribute more than one skill to a team. The order of these preferred roles (as shown in a Belbin Team Roles Report) can change between reports.
There are two factors that can affect the order of Team Roles shown on your report:
1. Your environment can change
2. You can change
Your environment can change:
Every job and team has its own set of requirements. As these requirements can change over time, you may need to adjust your behaviors to match the work situation. The balance of team roles across a team can also affect the contribution you make in each of your preferred team roles.
You can change:
Your behavior can also change based upon role learning: through an awareness of your strengths and weaknesses, you can improve your performance in each of your preferred roles. (You may find our article on How To Become a More Effective Team Leader helpful for further reading on this topic.) As you develop team roles, the order in which they are displayed on a Belbin Report will change to reflect this development of your strengths.
Some roles may be more likely to change than others
Some of the Belbin Team Roles may be more linked to personality factors, which are less likely to change over time than behavioral factors. For example, “outgoing” is an adjective that is linked to the Resource Investigator role.
How often should I redo my Belbin Report?
We recommend redoing your Belbin Report to track your development on your preferred team roles. Our experience is that once a year is generally a good time-frame to redo your report, unless your work or team situation has changed (in which case you may want to redo it sooner). You can use the Belbin Report as a tool to compare how you rank your preferred team roles versus how others rank these contributions.
If you’re interested in finding out more:
Call us toll-free in North America at 877.333.3606 or phone us at 416.483.7380.
Email us at info@belbinnorthamerica.com.
About the Author
Max is the CEO of Belbin North America. He brings a depth of knowledge and experience from his career in general management and consulting in North America, England, Europe and Asia. Max has assisted CEOs and senior leaders within client organizations with the design and implementation of Interaction Planning processes, team based organizational development programs and Lean Six Sigma initiatives.
