Belbin Team Roles – personality profiling at work, what’s it all about?

Do you have a lot of conflict in your team?  It could be because key members have personality profiles which clash. Or is yours a happy team but not producing the kind of results the organisation would expect?  Perhaps you have too many harmony-focused profiles and not enough action.

Belbin Team Roles asks you questions about the way you tend to operate in various work-based scenarios to give you a detailed overview of the roles you prefer to play at work.  These aren’t job-related roles (so you won’t find out if you should have been a traffic warden) but rather the way you like to deliver your work.  The eight profiles are wide-ranging and quite detailed, but in our experience the results can be very interesting and revealing.  Do you tend to value forward momentum over the happiness of the team for example?  Then you might find that you have a preference for behaving as a Shaper.  Whilst the potential downside of that profile is immediately obvious – Shapers can sometimes forget to ensure that team morale is bolstered, it helps to understand the strength of the Shaper – those people will keep the team moving.  Even understanding that about yourself can be useful, but once you understand that about your colleagues it can be much easier to “speak their language”.

When it comes to our team three out of four of us love to sit around coming up with ideas (Plant) so creativity is not an issue.  However, with only one person who prefers the Implementer role we can sometimes find that fantastic ideas take a long while to be put into action.  What can we do about it?  Well now we know that three of us prefer to be Plants we are much more aware of ensuring that we capture those ideas and spend as much time working out how to make them happen as we did creating them.  We also know to value our Implementer and look for that preference in others we work with.

Personality profiling is a common tool used in HR across the globe and something we often use here at Change & Transformation with our clients.  Whether you’re using Myers Briggs (MBTI), Personality Colours, TetraMap, Disc or Belbin, the aim is always to help an individual get a better understanding of themselves and for others to get a stronger grasp of how to get the best out of their colleagues. If you haven’t already, why not try it with your team?