Leading through Growth: Ensuring a Successful Team

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

Now that you’ve built a team, how do you ensure that it is successful in delivering your growth requirements? An organization needs its team to initiate, contribute, monitor, and push boundaries in order to grow and succeed. According to Meredith Belbin, successful organizations are able to carry out nine (9) key team roles.

These team roles are different from job roles. Team roles are concerned with the behavior and the contribution of its members. The nine key team roles do not require nine members or job roles. Any member can hold more than one of the team roles. What is important is all nine are present. Below is the list of team roles and each of their strengths and weaknesses.

In order for a team to work well together, the team needs to structure itself according to these roles. This ensures that the job gets started, continues towards the right path and is completed. It is best to match the role with a member’s personality/characteristic. Force-fitting a role is a recipe for disaster. At the same time, if in the process the team discovers they lack a particular role it is best to find someone to fit in the role to join the team.

Each roles ensures that the team has someone to initiate, contribute, monitor and push boundaries while at the same time focusing on all processes whether its task-oriented, people-oriented or thinking.

In pursuing growth, an organization is faced with a mountain that requires an efficient and effective team to overcome. By taking into consideration your teams strengths and weaknesses, one is able to create a team that complements each other and eventually works towards meeting its objective. Leading through growth isn’t just about delegation or building a team, its bout creating an organization–a team—that is able to push forward your vision.