Business Brief – Team Work

In constructing teams, it’s important not just to get talented people, but the right combinations of
talents.
In the famous phrase, ‘it’s important to have a great team of minds, rather than a team of great
minds’, Meredith Belbin sees these types as necessary in teams, whether in business or elsewhere:
 The Implementer, who converts the team’s plan into something achievable.
 The Co-ordinator, who sets agendas, defines team-members’ roles and keeps the objectives
in view.
 The Shaper, who defines issues, shapes ideas and leads the action.
 The Plant, who provides the original ideas and finds new approaches when the team is stuck.
 The Resource Investigator, who communicates with the outside world and finds new ways to
get things done.
 The Monitor Evaluator, who evaluates information objectively and draws accurate
conclusions from it.
 The Team Worker, who builds the team, supports others and reduces conflict.
 The Completer Finisher, who gets the deadlines right.

This model lends itself better to some business situations than others., but the idea of roles and
competencies in a team is important, whatever form these take in particular situations. Some
organizations are more hierarchical and less democratic than others, and team members are
obviously expected to behave more deferentially in the former. Senior managers there have the
traditional leader’s role: what they say goes. In other organizations, power is more devolved, and
managers talk about, or at least pay lip-service to, the empowerment of those under them: the idea
that decision-making should be decentralized to members of their teams.
In addition to the traditional organization, we increasingly find virtual organizations and virtual
teams. People are brought together for a particular project and then disbanded. Here, in addition to
Belbin’s types above, the role of the selector/facilitator is crucial.

Stages of team life

The typical team is said to go through a number of stages during its existence.
1. Forming. The group is anxious and feels dependent on a leader. The group will be attempting
to discover how it is going to operate, what the ‘normal’ behaviors will be: how supportive, how
critical, how serious and how humorous the group will be.
2. Storming: The atmosphere may be one of conflict, with rebellion against the leader, conflict
between sub-groups and resistance to control. There is likely to be resistance to the task, and
even the sense that the task is impossible.
3. Norming. At this stage, members of the group feel closer together and the conflicts are
settled, or at least forgotten. Members of the group will start to support each other. There is
increasingly the feeling that the task is possible to achieve.
4. Performing. The group is carrying out the task for which it was formed. Roles within the group
are flexible, with people willing to do the work normally done by others. Members feel safe
enough to express differences of opinion in relation to others.
5. Mourning. The group is disbanded; its members begin to feel nostalgic about its activities and
achievements. Perhaps they go for a drink or a meal to celebrate.
All this may be familiar from the groups we encounter, and play our role in managing, in language
training.