Plants are creative, unorthodox and idea generators. If an innovative solution to a problem is needed, a Plant is a good person to ask. A good plant will be bright and free-thinking. Plants can tend to ignore incidentals and refrain from getting bogged down in detail. The Plant bears a strong resemblance to the popular caricature of the absentminded professor-inventor, and often has a hard time communicating ideas to others.
Resource Investigator
The Resource Investigator gives a team a rush of enthusiasm at the start of the project by vigorously pursuing contacts and opportunities. He or she is focused outside the team, and has a finger firmly on the pulse of the outside world. Where a Plant creates new ideas, a Resource Investigator will quite happily steal them from other companies or people. A good Resource Investigator is a maker of possibilities and an excellent networker, but has a tendency to lose momentum towards the end of a project and to forget small details.
Coordinator
A Coordinator often becomes the default chairperson of a team, stepping back to see the big picture. Coordinators are confident, stable and mature and because they recognise abilities in others, they are very good at delegating tasks to the right person for the job. The Coordinator clarifies decisions, helping everyone else focus on their tasks. Coordinators are sometimes perceived to be manipulative, and will tend to delegate all work, leaving nothing but the delegating for them to do.
Shaper
The shaper is a task-focused leader who abounds in nervous energy, who has a high motivation to achieve and for whom winning is the name of the game. The shaper is committed to achieving ends and will ‘shape’ others into achieving the aims of the team. He or she will challenge, argue or disagree and will display aggression in the pursuit of goal achievement. Two or three shapers in a group, according to Belbin, can lead to conflict, aggravation and in-fighting.
Monitor Evaluator
Monitor Evaluators are fair and logical observers and judges of what is going on. Because they are good at detaching themselves from bias, they are often the ones to see all available options with the greatest clarity. They take everything into account, and by moving slowly and analytically, will almost always come to the right decision. However, they can become excessively cynical, damping enthusiasm for anything without logical grounds, and they have a hard time inspiring themselves or others to be passionate about their work.
Teamworker
A Teamworker is the greasy oil between the cogs that keeps the machine that is the team running. They are good listeners and diplomats, talented at smoothing over conflicts and helping parties understand each other without becoming confrontational. The beneficial effect of a Teamworker is often not noticed until they are absent, when the team begins to argue, and small but important things cease to happen. Because of an unwillingness to take sides, a Teamworker may not be able to take decisive action when it is needed.
Implementer
The Implementer takes what the other roles have suggested or asked, and turns their ideas into positive action. They are efficient and self-disciplined, and can always be relied on to deliver on time. They are motivated by their loyalty to the team or company, which means that they will often take on jobs everyone else avoids or dislikes. However, they may be seen as closed-minded and inflexible since they will often have difficulty deviating from their own well-thought-out plans.
Completer Finisher
The Completer Finisher is a perfectionist and will often go the extra mile to make sure everything is "just right," and the things he or she delivers can be trusted to have been double-checked and then checked again. The Completer Finisher has a strong inward sense of the need for accuracy, rarely needing any encouragement from others because that individual's own high standards are what he or she tries to live up to. They may frustrate their teammates by worrying excessively about minor details and refusing to delegate tasks that they do not trust anyone else to perform.
Specialist
Specialists are passionate about learning in their own particular field. As a result, they will have the greatest depth of knowledge, and enjoy imparting it to others. They are constantly improving their wisdom. If there is anything they do not know the answer to, they will happily go and find it. Specialists bring a high level of concentration, ability, and skill in their discipline to the team, but can only contribute on that narrow front and will tend to be uninterested in anything which lies outside its narrow confines.
Questions for discussion:
- Which of these roles do you think might be most important to meeting the challenges faced by an Information Technology team?
- How likely is it that one person will fill more than one of Belbin's roles on an IT Team?
- Are people born with Belbin's "powers," or can they acquire them?
These aren't "powers" so much as they are roles we choose to fill. Some people have the emotional and psychological flexibility to fill a variety of roles, while others will fill one or perhaps two of them.
ReplyDeleteAs for which role is most important--there are no unimportant roles on any team. Pitchers need outfielders and infielders and catchers all. Take away any one role and the team is diminished.
The better question is how does one identify and fill these roles in building out an IT team?
Peter wrote almost what I was going to write. Unless you can identify the suitability of a person to a role, knowing that roles exist does not help much. I find Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator to be relevant and useful but more importantly, it is possible to engage this mechanism by mere observation of others and arrive at pretty good allocation of staff to role. The idea behind MBTI is that many behavior traits are in a positive feedback cycle that tends to maintain certain alignments; or in other words, human behavior is not uniformly distributed across all possible behaviors. An introvert, for instance, tends to avoid meeting other people, which behavior ensures that he will remain an introvert. An emotionally motivated person will judge the world through feelings, and those feelings will be biased in such a way to maintain the judgment that created the bias in the first place. An example is the conspiracy theorist -- the very best conspiracy of all has no evidence whatsoever, becoming therefore proof of conspiracy. (Michael Gordon)
ReplyDeleteMapping between various personality type indicators is possible but overlaps exist. The MBTI makes no attempt to arrive at conclusions; it is an observational tool and we can create our own conclusions rather easily from it. Belbin's roles depend heavily upon your personal understanding of what the words mean. Let us consider "Monitor Evaluator". By itselt that is not very descriptive, you need the entire paragraph to go with it and maybe you know someone like that. In MBTI, we might call such a person "INTP" or "INTJ" (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinker, and uses a Perceiving function to 'extravert' or interact with the world). So, while you might not know right away whether a person is a "Plant", you can easily observe that she is extraverted, imaginative, feels things (rather than thinks or analyzes), and acts promptly on her feeligns. That is ENFJ in Myers-Briggs parlance. If you map ENFJ to "Plant", then you can easily spot your "Plants" where I would say you easily spot your ENFJ's.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for your comments.
ReplyDeletePeter: Your observation that we should seek a scientific way of identifying the people who would be best suited for each role is an excellent one.
Anonymous: (Are you Michael Gordon? Both comments?) I'm intrigued by your suggestion that mapping MBTI types to Belbin roles might provide such a scientific method. I didn't find such an association in my lit search. Have you seen anything like that published anywhere?
BTW, I'm familiar with MBTI [I'm an ENTJ], but not certified in the use of the instrument. There are many subtleties in the interpretation of Myers-Briggs. Do you think attempting such a mapping in a real-world situation would require MBTI certification to "get it right?"