Designing Effective Teams

Belbin

Dr R Meredith Belbin (1981) identified certain factors that seemed to be critical in determining the success or failure of a team:

• a similarity between the personal qualities of the person leading the team and the typical characteristics of the co-ordinator team role
• the presence of one strong plant (i.e. 'creative person')
• a reasonable spread of mental abilities
• wide coverage of all team roles
• a good match between functional role and team role characteristics
• awareness by team members of the various team roles

Belbin's work roles

Belbin asserted that an effective team should include nine key roles (that may not correspond to work-related roles):
1) co-ordinator
2) team worker
3) plant
4) monitor-evaluator
5) implementer
6) completer-finisher
7) shaper
8) resource-investigator
9) specialist

Ken Fairclough's Advice

Ken questioned whether we should split the intended outcomes from the roles we developed:

The Four Roles

1) Pushing and Doing
2) Envisioning
3) Languaging
4) New Knowing

The Four Intended Outcomes

1) Data Sharing Synergies
2) Information Sharing Synergiers
3) Knowledge Sharing Synergies
4) Wisdom Sharing Synergies

The 4 outcomes were inspired by Ken's earlier work, but may now be out of date, if it does not enable active roles to be embodied.

Later work by Ken up-dated these outcomes with the following role enabled players:-

1) Commander - Wisdom Sharing
2) Navigator - Knowledge Sharing
3) Mapper - Information Sharing
4) Surveyor - Data Sharing

His video (recorded 29-1-07) draws attention to the work of Ned Hermann which has defined 4 'cognitive dialects':

1) Conceptual
2) Touchy-Feely
3) Process-oriented
4) Analytical

These 'cognative dialects' then map directly onto the Commander/Navigator roles in the same order. The primary difference between Ned Hermann and Ken Fairclough works, is the adaption of a tetra based non-linear model by Ken.

For any successful solution based group meeting a "Tribal Fusion" (input from all four cognitive dialects is essential. (Fairclough 2005). This ensures the creation and sustainability of a sagacity, an epistemological space to capture serendipic knowledge, the primary source of novel knowledge.

(See Hermann Institute (UK), Herrmann Institute (US) and (printer friendly test).

return / go to m21 Meetings Page
return / go to Other AU Research