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Ever had to form a group of people into a team in a hurry and wondered if there was any ‘formula’ for assigning roles to individuals to build a successful team?

Many Business Management courses offer the ‘Belbin Roles’ as a model for identifying an ‘ideal’ team. Whether you are sceptical or curious about such a concept, just the exercise of completing the ‘self perception inventory’ questionnaire to determine each individual’s profile - and hence ideal role - is a good ice-breaker for a group who don’t already know each other.

R. Meredith Belbin (1981) identified eight roles and suggested an ideal team should consist of : Either a Chairman or a Shaper; a Plant (also known as an Innovator); a Monitor-evaluator; and, any number of the following roles - Resource Investigator, Company Worker, Team Worker, Completer-finisher.

The personal characteristics, strengths and weaknesses associated with each type of role are summarised in the following table.

Type	Personal Characteristics	Team-Role Contributions	Allowable Weaknesses
Company Worker	Conservative, disciplined, reliable	Organises, turns ideas and plans into practical forms of action	Somewhat inflexible, slow to respond to new possibilities
Chairman	Mature, confident, trusting	Clarifies goals and priorities, motivates colleagues, promotes decision-making	Not outstanding in intelligence or creative ability
Shaper	Highly strung, outgoing, dynamic	Challenges, pressurises, finds ways round obstacles	Prone to provocation and short-lived bursts of temper
Plant	Clever, imaginative, unorthodox	Created original ideas, solves difficult problems	Weak in communications with and managing ordinary people
Resource Investigator	Extroverted, enthusiastic, curious, communicative	Explorer new possibilities, develops contacts, negotiates	Loses interest once initial enthusiasm has passed
Monitor Evaluator	Sober, intelligent, dry, objective	Sees all options, analyses, judges likely outcomes accurately	Lacks drive and ability to inspire others
Team Worker	Social, mild, accomodating, perceptive	Listens, builds, averts friction, handles difficult people	Indecisive in crunch situations
Completer	Painstaking, conscientious, anxious	Searches for errors, omissions, oversights, concentrates on and keeps others to schedules and targets	Inclined to worry unduly, reluctant to delegate

Since his original work Belbin has identified a ninth team role - that of Specialist which is also covered in the latest edition of his book “Management Teams - why they succeed or fail”. Full information is available from the BelBin Associates Web site.