Last week I had the privilege of being in the room with the team from Belbin.com, Academics, business owners, CEO’s, Head’s of Learning and Development and PHD’s for the first Belbin conference in 8 years. At Essential Training, Dad has been using Belbin for years to help enhance self-awareness for our clients. We find it a brilliant tool to have impactful conversations that drive real business results for our clients’ people.
Belbin is a tool to better understand each team member’s individual behavioural style within a team. Rather than a personality assessment, it’s focused on behaviours, to see where each team member’s strengths and weaknesses lie in a team dynamic. After doing some group and individual coaching sessions around Belbin, people tend to be more efficient at work, leaning into their strengths and more aware of their weaknesses. Real conversations flow, because a shared language starts to form within the team. As a group, they become better able to delegate, collaborate and communicate, leading to stronger team performance and better results.
Belbin was developed by Dr. Meredith Belbin and his research team after 9 years of research at Henley Management College over 30 years ago, answering the question:
“What makes a successful team?”
The Belbin behavioural assessment consists of 9 team roles. After completing a Belbin survey, we are presented with a profile. Our profile is made up of a spectrum of those roles, broken down into our strengths and weakness within a team dynamic. Here’s a summary of each team role:
Strengths/Preferences
When we understand which team roles are our strongest, we can lean into those behaviours and play to our strengths within our team.
For example, I have included a link to my Belbin profile below. To elucidate some of the main points, I am strong in the roles:
- Resource Investigator (RI) ☎️ meaning I love meeting new people, learning from outside sources.
- Plant (PL) 🌱 coming up with ideas and starting things.
- Team Worker (TW) 👭🧑🤝🧑 I love collaborating and supporting my teammates.
Weaknesses/Least Preferences
We can also learn where our behavioural gaps lie and where we need help, when to delegate, or to collaborate with someone who demonstrates behaviours that we aren’t strong in or were not drawn to!
In contrast, my least favourite roles are:
- Complete Finisher (CF) 🧮 meaning I need help when it comes to being detail orientated, and with the finer details, especially at the end of a project.
- Implementer (IMP) 🏋️ being consistent in following up with work. The beginning of projects excite me so much that I could tend to move from project to project before they are properly up and running.
- Monitor Evaluator (ME) ⚖️ I prefer to make intuitive decisions rather than looking at lots of data before acting.
By learning more about our natural team roles, we increase our self-awareness around work. When our whole team increases their self-awareness, and awareness of other, it helps with having empathy for each other, communication and collaboration. This reduces friction amongst the teams creates a more cohesive team dynamic, and makes for better results.
Similarly, as managers, by using Belbin we can better understand our team’s behavioural strengths and more effectively motivate, lead, delegate and collaborate with our team. A great quote from the conference, it increases our “collective emotional intelligence”.
Often people shift roles (within the team or outside the team) once they understand their Belbin report better.
Over the last two days I heard so many real-world stories where different companies have used Belbin to improve their operational efficiency.
Here’s a summary of the stories that stuck out to me:
- Deepak Deshpande, Vice President & Head Customer Experience at Tata Business Excellence Group, a $10 billion dollar Indian behemoth who use Belbin with a large cohort of their internal assessors to make for more efficient team work.
- We heard from the co-founder of Oppo a healthy, low-calorie ice-cream business with roughly 15 staff who after making many mistakes with hiring and growing their team in incorrect directions, used Belbin to better utilize the skills of their people and attract the right people for the right roles. Ultimately helping the company to grow more efficiently.
- Alejandro, the CEO of Caravela Coffee spoke about how he realised that his team of 16 leaders in the business were missing two important behavioural traits, meaning they were not seeing the results they wanted. Belbin helped them discover the gaps within their team. As a result, they transformed their hiring strategy to look for behavioural traits rather than technical knowledge, resulting in a far more efficient team dynamic, less overheads, and more successful results.
- Gary Shewan, head of L&D at Legal and General (a company with 11,000 staff) and their emerging leaders programme and a yearly 12-month leadership programme that uses Belbin as a central point of focus to facilitate growth within each person. He told such a compelling story of one of the emerging leaders on their programme, who through working with Belbin, came to a deeper understanding of herself, was able to lean more into her strength, switched roles internally to one far more suited to her strengths and has been promoted twice as a result.
As well as these real-world examples from Belbin clients, we heard from fellow consultant companies, facilitators and coaches who use Belbin to drive impactful insights for their clients.
Pearl D’Souza McKenzie spoke about linking Belbin profiles with Daniel Goldman’s concept of Emotional Intelligence, consisting of empathy, effective communication or social skills, self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation.
DeeDee Smartt Lynch and her husband spoke about linking Belbin with the famous book 5 dysfunctions of a team. They mapped the 5 effective ways teams can work together with the Belbin roles.
Dr. Geraint Wyn Story facilitated a session on experiential learning, using Lego games and Belbin to facilitate conversation around our strength and weaknesses in a safe space of informality and psychological safety. Talan Miller from Sabre Corporate Development a team building company and his partner spoke about their experiential learning workshops and how they combine those outdoor and indoor team-building games with Belbin profiles, to mix fun and facts in a compelling way for client engagement and insightful outcomes.
Overall, I was so impressed by everyone who I met. There was a warmth, authenticity and genuine care present in each workshop and interaction I had, which left me so encouraged of the value of this work and of the strength of the Belbin community.
There was such a variety of languages, cultures, countries and industries represented at the conference. It was a real indicator to me that Belbin can be used all over the world, in many different contexts, as long as the team and the leaders are open to learning more about themselves and willing to be self-reflective.
I wrote this on the Ryanair flight home to Dublin from Cambridge, to try and encapsulate all that I learned, so that I remember it and share with others. I’m excited to bring these fresh insights into the work with our clients, both in 1-1’s and team workshops.
Please reach out to me if you’d like us to run some workshops with your team, where we incorporate Belbin. The results will help to improve your team atmosphere, interpersonal understanding and ultimately your effectiveness and results.
Sláinte,
Brian