Go team! – two theories for effective teamworking
Here are two useful concepts to consider when thinking about how team members work together in a collaborative project:
1. Getting the right mix of people is essential to turn creativity into collaborative action. There’s little value in a group of people that have exactly the same skills – no one will learn anything new and it’s likely that the project will get stuck at a certain point. And this goes beyond technical skills such as product design, photography, illustration etc – it’s also about the soft skills that can contribute to project development and move it forward.
Belbin’s Team Roles provides a good model for the different personalities that should be present within a group to make it work effectively:
(Note: these are simplified definitions – visit the link above for full and detailed descriptions)
- Plant – the ideas person
- Resource investigator – the entrepreneurial one
- Coordinator – the leader
- Shaper – the achiever
- Monitor Evaluator – the objective (or critical) one
- Team worker – the one that holds it together
- Implementer – the doer
- Completer Finisher- the perfectionist
- Specialist – the brains
Each role has it’s advantages and disadvantages. ‘Plants’ and ‘resource investigators’ might be great at the start of a project when generating ideas and researching but what happens towards the end when things need to get up and running? Likewise, a team of ‘implementers’ might get things done, but might not bring the most innovative and creative results.
2. Once you’ve got the right people in place, any new team will most certainly go through the stages of team development identified by Tuckman:
- Forming – getting to know each other
- Storming – early clashes
- Norming – settling into roles, establishing ‘rules of engagement’
- Performing – getting on with it
(Again, visit the link for more detailed explanations of each stage)
Watch any episode of The Apprentice and you’ll see this in play (although perhaps they tend to get stuck at the ‘storming’ stage!).
Have these two theories in mind about the way that teams work, at the start of a project and throughout, and it will almost certainly ensure that the skills and expertise of each individual are used effectively and that the team develops well to get high quality creative ideas off the ground and through to delivery.
August 20 2009 12:42 pm | Project management and Teams
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[...] according to key skills and personalities to ensure a good spread of what the project requires (Belbin is a good tool for profiling this). Time must also be allocated to planning, scheduling and [...]