The team can have a magic composition

No doubt, the composition of a team can affect the work of a team. In fact, different individuals make a team while each of them may have a distinct role based on the Belbin Team Inventory which was designed and developed by Meredith Belbin years ago. Different members of a team have to play various roles so that team can enjoy from a variety of complementary roles needed for its existence.

The roles which were explained by Belbin were as follow:

-                      Plant: The Innovator.  Unorthodox, knowledgeable and imaginative, turning out loads of radical ideas.  The creative engine-room that needs careful handling to be effective.  Individualistic, disregarding practical details or protocol - can become an unguided missile. 

-                      Resource Investigator: The extrovert, enthusiastic communicator, with good connections outside the team.  Enjoys exploring new ideas, responds well to challenges, and creates this attitude amongst others.  Noisy and energetic, quickly loses interest, and can be lazy unless under pressure.

-                      Chairman: Calm, self-confident and decisive when necessary.  The social leader of the group, ensuring individuals contribute fully, and guiding the team to success.  Unlikely to bring great intellect or creativity.

-                      Shaper: Energetic, highly-strung, with a drive to get things done.  They challenge inertia, ineffectiveness and complacency in the team, but can be abrasive, impatient and easily provoked.  Good leaders of start-up or rapid-response teams

-                      Monitor (Evaluator) : Unemotional, hardheaded and prudent.  Good at assessing proposals, monitoring progress and preventing mistakes.  Dispassionate, clever and discrete.  Unlikely to motivate others, takes time to consider, may appear cold and uncommitted.  Rarely wrong.

-                      Team Worker: Socially-oriented and sensitive to others.  Provides an informal network of communication and support that spreads beyond the formal activities of the team.  Often the unofficial or deputy leader, preventing feuding and fragmentation.  Concern for team spirit may divert from getting the job done.

-                      Company worker: The Organizer who turns plans into tasks.  Conservative, hard-working, full of common sense, conscientious and methodical.  Orthodox thinks who keeps the team focused on the tasks in hand.  Lacks flexibility, and unresponsive to new ideas

-                      Finisher (Completer): Makes sure the team delivers.  An orderly, anxious perfectionist who worries about everything.  Maintains a permanent sense of urgency that can sometimes help and sometimes hinder the team.  Good at follow-up and meeting deadlines.

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Belbin has designed a test to evaluate the roles the individuals can play in a team.

 Also, age, sometimes, could be of great importance. For instance, the time when we were involved in a project to start a documentary production team, we really needed love, audacity, thoughtfulness, and motivation to be able to move through the tough barriers in front of us. As the ages were different in the team (from 25 to 50), it helped us a great deal, since those with higher age, were more people of thought, and those with lower age, were persons of energy and courage. This magic composition was the whole thing that we needed in that time to be successful.

To my point of view, the more the team is diverse, the more it has power. To have a magic composition, we have to add more diversity and pluralism.

Teams create magic results

Let me tell you about an experience about a training team which had five members with different expertise. One of them was a good trainer, the second was an extraordinary expert in report writing, the third was a genius in communication with clients and other stakeholders, the fourth was a good manager and was able to carry out planning activities and implementation, and the last was a master in documentation.

When we started a training project, we spent less time, less costs with little inconvenience and unforeseeable events; the training project went on very well and the progress was awesome. At  the end,  we gained magic results.

In fact, in similar examples, when there is a professional distribution of duties based on talents and competencies, there are always magic results at the end.

In the above example, the trainer was professional because he knew well what to do; he did his job in the best possible way; he was focused on it since he had no concern about other duties to be done in the team.  The report writer was a professional too, and she did her job in due time, which resulted in good outputs. Others were somehow completing the work since the communication with the stakeholders was at best possible level, and the manager was able to push the training plan and the person in charge of documentary film and photography did his best too.

A review of the team work showed that:

• Members in the team worked professionally;
• As each member of the team was responsible for one single activity,  the accuracy was certainly higher;
• A mixture of different experiences created better results;
• Due to the division of the work, activities were done at same time – more synergy and cost reduction;
• More reduction in time;
• Any possible weakness was compensated by other empowered members.

A well-defined team has extraordinary results!